I received a question on my post - Flash Quiz Tools - asking about any tools that were free that allowed you to create a Flash Quiz. The only free Flash Quiz Tool that I know anything about is

Class Marker - a free flash quiz tool. Create multiple choice, true false, free text, short answer, fill in the blank and punctuation quizzes.

So I added this back into my post, but it got me wondering if there aren't a lot of other solutions out there that I don't know about. Certainly you could do this as poll questions. So are there other free flash quiz tools that I'm missing?

If you are looking at this then you might want to also look at Beginning of Long Slow Death of Flash and whether you really want to use Flash. Then take a look at some solutions that don't produce Flash Low-Cost Test and Quiz Tool Comparison.

I would love to hear back from people on this as I received a question around firewall problems and solutions that I've not heard as much in the past couple of years. This blog reader provides eLearning content to a variety of customers from their hosted solution. Their solution uses a variety of technologies including: .wma files, JavaScript, Flash, HTML and downloadable PPT.

Their issue is that they are running into customers who are tightening their firewall settings and it causes some of their content to not work.

My sense is that the days when IT was doing things like stripping JavaScript, disallowing Flash, etc. are gone. So my first question is ...

Are you finding issues with firewalls these days? If so, what are you seeing?

Anyone having issues with Windows Media and firewalls? How about other media playback?

I couldn't tell from the message, but it could be the case that they are using some kind of custom player. My sense is that using a custom Player is still a really bad idea in most cases. Creating a Flash shell or a JavaScript based shell is fine. Anything else, especially ActiveX or Java is likely going to be a big problem. Even if you try to do everything over port 80, it's still an issue to get something down and run. But that's my bias. So my second question is ...

Are people still using custom players in anything other than Flash? If so, how do they avoid problems with firewalls and other security systems designed to strip out potentially malicious code? Do Flash players cause any problems with firewalls?

Finally, the reader asked about requesting clients to change their firewall settings. My experience is "good luck." There have been a couple of occasions when we could get changes made to the firewall. But unless you have a lot of influence, you should not be creating solutions that generally require changes. Thus, stick with standard ports, protocols, file formats, etc. Does anyone disagree?

What about getting changes made to firewall settings?

I've posted Work Task - Workshop Exercise and would very much appreciate any thoughts, input, help you can give.

On my post Quick Wins, I received some questions around use of Web 2.0 in the workplace (really they relate to eLearning 2.0). My quick example of one strategy that I've seen repeated successfully in several organizations:

• 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.

The comments are interesting to see and discuss:

Can anyone tell me where QUALITY comes into play with these collaborative enterprise 2.0 technologies? Or does anyone even care about that anymore?

Later they say:

Invariably, quality will mean very different things to different elearning providers. Also, different needs will necessitate different solutions.

My quality concerns: Is it instructionally sound? What about the user experience? Above all, what are the learning outcomes? At what point do lowered standards become the standard?

This is partly the same instruction vs. support question we've had all along? If we provide information in the form of performance support, reference material, etc., then how do you know if the instruction was successful? The answer has always been:

Is the person able to perform?

Force marching someone through something that is high quality "instruction" - something deemed to be instructionally sound - doesn't make it any better and could be far worse since they probably won't actually go through it, will forget, etc. This will be highly variable on a case-by-case basis and really on a learner/performer basis. This hasn't changed. But our desire to move stuff to performance support has definitely increased and is more and more often the appropriate approach.

What has changed in my example is that the learner / performer or people who support the performance (e.g., the help desk) are able to change content in the support materials.

I'm not sure, but it seems that the commenter is making an assumption that this lowers quality. It theoretically could. Someone could add total garbage. But what's their incentive to do that. This is certainly something being discussed with revenge of the experts being pitted against the wisdom of crowds. I personally look at it in each case and consider what quality issues we are really talking about. Is it contributions by end-users that may be wrong? Do you have people monitoring? Maybe that gives us a great opportunity to intercept information that otherwise is being transmitted today in channels that aren't monitored. To me, it's often better to have it visible and discussed. In fact, I would claim that

Worries over quality is not something that should hold you back.

What really got me to post about this is the last question - "lowered standards" ... What? How does this equate to lower standards? The person who left the comment is expressing something I hear a lot at presentations and in client organizations. It's not at all the reality that goes along with most eLearning 2.0 implementations.

If you are going to worry about something, worry about lack of participation. Worry about lack of skills. The quality issue is a lot of hot air.

Just saw a post by Mark Oehlert - Danger of Quick Wins. I had to post because, I think that Mark missed the mark (sorry couldn't resist). Here's the gist of his thinking:

As I become more and more convinced that implementing next-gen/Web 2.0 is soooo much less about technology than about culture (Duh Mark, I know)...

I think the idea of 'quick wins' can be not only distracting but wasteful. I think that often 'quick wins' are used to cover up the lack of an over-arching strategy against which actions can be measured and be found either to support an long-range plan or not to support it or to support it in some measure. That strategy is the long pole in the tent - it is the metric that we can measure our actions against.

So 'quick wins' are fine as long as they take place within the context of a long-range plan and are executed in such a manner as to continue progress toward that vision.

I agree with Mark that there are fairly sizable organizational culture aspects to enterprise adoption of enterprise 2.0 / web 2.0 / eLearning 2.0. And I think it's easy to underestimate that impact. I think Mark missed the bigger barriers of Changing Knowledge Worker Attitudes and the work literacy gap.

But what forced me to write this post is that I couldn't disagree more about whether to do Quick Wins. His suggestion to hold up on implementing quick wins until we can figure out all the big picture strategy, OD, etc. answers is bad advice.

My suggested strategy is almost completely opposite. I think you should go ahead and:

• 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.

How does this fit into the grand strategy? You don't know? Who cares? It's the right thing to do! I'd argue that it's a good quick-win.

And, when you look at adoption patterns - a lot of what makes adoption of Web 2.0 tools likely is that they are easy to adopt and have immediate value for the individual and work group. They are designed for quick wins.

Mark - there's a reason that Andrew McAfee talks about these things being emergent (Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration) - quick-wins are going to be how this is adopted.

Rachel just posted a question via a comment on the post Background Reading - Use of PowerPoint:

I need help with a Powerpoint possible use. I teach freshman composition at a university to non-native speakers of English. They often come to me for extra help in their other classes. However, they ALWAYS need help creating PowerPoint presentations for their other classes of subjects such as economics, nutrition, statistics, travel & Tourism...etc. I spend time teaching and explaining "transitions", custom animations"...etc. I thought, as I am helping them so much, is there any information as to using Powerpoint as an actual tool to teach composition writing? It would be great to impart knowledge just in the structure of a composition....any thoughts or resources out there? Thanks

I always say, I love questions. However, I'm a bit at a loss on how to answer this question.

It seems wrong to be teaching about transitions and custom animations to this audience, right?

I don't know much about using PowerPoint as a tool to teach composition.

Any help for Rachel?

When Microsoft start giving stuff away for free, it always makes me curious, and when I spotted this free LCDS (Learning Content Development System) a while back I decided to download it and give it a try.

If like me you've never had the patience (or the time and money) to really master a tool like Flash, but like the idea of creating interactive materials that can run online (SCORM compliant to run in an LMS), then this could be a handy tool for you. I spent the best part of a day working out how to use it and creating some materials with it for a teacher training session and by the end of the day I had two 'modules' each of 4 -5 different activity types combining images, audio, video and swf animation. Considering that I hadn't used this before and I had to actually write all the materials to put into it, I think that's pretty good for just one day, and having put the time into learning the program, I'm pretty sure that my next efforts will be much quicker.

What I liked about it

• It wasn't difficult to learn how to use. The interface is quite intuitive and I didn't need to consult the help or any support documentation.
• It's all point and click, no programming languages to learn.
• The results look quite professional
• It's SCORM compliant
  
• It has some nice task types. These are a few of my favourites:

This one is grouping type activity played against a timer. Users have to click the correct bucket to drop each item into.

This is one of my favourites, it's called 'Adventure' but I know it as a reading maze. User are shown a situation and given some options, They then see the outcome of the option they choose and have to make another choice and so on until they find the 'correct' way to resolve th problem. These can be really complex to write and arrange, but this one was quite easy to do and to review and make changes. I was also able to add different images to each page.


Another task type I liked was this tile flip activity. It's a novel variation on pelmanism, but it combines the matching pairs with a kind of true false activity. Basically each tile has a true statement on one side and a false one on the other, and the user has to line up rows of true statements. They also have a limited amount of cards they can turn to get it right and if they exceed the number of turns they have to start all over again.


Lastly, I liked that you can also set up tasks using either video or swf files. This is one I created using a Flash tutorial and the built in Note taking part of the interface.


What I wasn't so sure about

• It only seems to support swf and wmv files for video, which is a bit annoying, especially for MAC users.
• When I came to 'publish' / upload the materials to run online, it turned out that they wouldn't work without being uploaded to an LMS (with its own viewer)
• You need IE 7 with Silverlight installed to view the files (though there does seem to be a way to configure the files to run in Flash instead, which I'm assuming would allow you to view them in Firefox too).

Despite all of this, Microsoft's LCDS does seem to have huge potential for people like me who struggle with coding, but want to produce something that looks good and works well.

If you work in an institution that has its own LMS and you want to digitise some course materials to run online, then it could well be worth looking at as a cheap (free) solution.

If you'd like to try out the materials I created for training teachers in the use of IT and evaluating different task types, you can download the zip file of the whole session (9.4Mb) from here.

As I said above though, you'll need to have MS's Silverlight installed, then go to the file named 'wrapper.htm' and open it to begin working through the materials.

If you want to download the free LCDS and have a play yourself, then go here: https://www.microsoft.com/learning/tools/lcds/default.mspx

I'd be really interested to hear from anyone else who's tried this, especially if they've managed to get some working examples up online, so do drop me a line and share your experiences.

Best

Nik Peachy

I've just posted Identify Knowledge Work Tasks - Workshop Exercise which describes a workshop exercise that I'm considering using in several different workshops. I feel like it makes a lot of the discussion more concrete.

I'm really hoping that folks will help me out by:

a. telling me what they would say if they were in the workshop and
b. giving me thoughts on the exercise itself.

The last time I posted something like this it was a HUGE help and I significantly redesigned the exercise which probably saved me a lot of grief. See comments in Conference Session Breakout - which convinced me not to do it as a breakout activity. Actually, I probably never will do session breakouts unless there's a REALLY compelling reason... but I digress.

Please help: Identify Knowledge Work Tasks - Workshop Exercise

For me, one of the main blocks to really developing online language learning courses has been the inability to supply real communicative speaking practice. VOIP software like Skype has certainly pushed the bounds of what is possible, as has the development of more effective web based video conferencing platforms, but in my opinion the biggest step towards making this possible has been the developments made in virtual worlds like There.com and Second Life which not only enable the use of voice, but can also help students to develop an understanding gesture and spatial relationships while speaking.

For anyone interested in giving it a try, here are four basic tutorial videos to help you get started with how voice works in Second Life and how you can use it for pair and group work.

Setting up voice
This video shows you how to activate the voice client and make sure that the quality of your sound is good. It also shows you how to select the correct input and output devices for sound in case you are having any problems.



Using the active speaker window
This video shows you how to find and use the active speaker window. This enables you to find out who is within 'voice range' of you, as well as enabling you to balance out the volume of the voices around you and even to mute other speakers if you just want to listen in to one person.



Using 'IM Call' for pair and group work
If you have large groups of students all in close proximity to each other, running activities like pair or group work can be chaotic as everyone hears what everyone else is saying. This video shows you how to use the 'IM Call' feature to put the students into pairs or groups, so that they only hear the people they are working with. Then you as the teacher can move between the groups monitoring, without having to hear the whole class all at once.



Balancing out relative volumes
Second Life has a lot of different sound sources, such as the ambient sound of trees and water around you, the sounds of gestures, background music, media players and th voices of people speaking. This video shows you how to balance out the sounds and turn off the ones you don't want to hear.



I would be really interested to hear comments from anyone who has used Video conferencing and or Second Life. Which do you prefer?

If you are new to or haven't tried Second Life yet, then I hope you find these videos useful and they encourage you to try it out. The videos were originally commissioned by The Consultants-E and are part of an introductory course for teachers they deliver on Edunation Island II and are used with their kind consent.

Best
Nik Peachey

My other postings on Second Life and virtual worlds

• Materials design for Virtual Worlds
• Teaching English in Second Life
• Second Life Teacher Training Videos
• Looking at There.com
• Machinima with Moviestorm
• 3B Village 3D browser

Visit my YouTube Channel to watch more of my videos
http://youtube.com/NikPeachey

At lunch today, I had a funny experience that I just had to share. The person I met for lunch (a CEO at a client company) today is his birthday. And, it's my birthday. And it's today.

So, if I'm right, then it's a 1 in 365.25 chance that we share a birthday. And maybe a 20 in 365.25 chance that it would be on our birthdays that we get together. So, that's roughly a:

1 in 6,700 chance

and even the chance of that happening in a lifetime is pretty remote.

It just struck me as a pretty cool occurrence.

The only disappointing part is that when we told the waitress that it was both our birthdays, she seemed completely unimpressed. (But she did give us each free dessert.)

Just wanted to announce that I'll be doing a full-day workshop in Cincinnati (actually in nearby Kentucky) for the Greater Cincinnati ASTD on July 15. I think this is going to be an interesting and fun workshop. I'm hoping that a few folks who read this blog will go.

You can go to their site: http://gcastd.org to find out more about specific place, time, cost, etc.

Likely I (and others in Work Literacy) will be doing similar workshops over the next few months. If you are interested, but can't attend this workshop, then you might want to go to Work Literacy and go to Services to state your interest.

Hope to see some of you there. If you are going, please drop a comment.

The workshop description is:

A Revolution in Workplace Learning

Tools such as blogs, wikis, social networks, social bookmarking, and RSS readers are revolutionizing formal and informal workplace learning.

GCASTD is bringing nationally-known expert Dr. Tony Karrer to Greater Cincinnati to present a fun, engaging, fast-paced workshop that will allow you to use these "eLearning 2.0" methods and tools for yourself and your organization.

You will:

• Learn specific methods you can use to accelerate your own knowledge work and learning
• Define strategies for eLearning 2.0 for your organization
• Make a plan for getting an eLearning 2.0 toolset for yourself and your organization

Who Should Attend

• Leaders responsible for organizational learning and development
• Individuals seeking to improve their own skill and knowledge

About the Facilitator

Dr. Tony Karrer is CEO/CTO of TechEmpower, a software, eLearning and web development firm based in Los Angeles. A expert on using technology to improve human performance, he is a sought-after presenter on eLearning 2.0 and it’s implications on workplace learning. He is author of the award-winning eLearning Technology blog.

Dr. Karrer earned both his M.S. and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of South California. He attended USC as a Tau Beta Fellow, awarded to the top 30 engineers in the United States, and was valedictorian for his class.

Clients include: Credit Suisse, Citibank, Lexus, Microsoft, Nissan, Universal, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun, Symbol Technologies and many others.

If you want to get a sense of what Second Life is like and particularly what it is like as part of learning, here are some videos that help describe this.

What videos did I miss?

Social networking is one of the key concepts that is driving Web 2.0 these days. With the opportunities social networks offer for collaboration and communication, this is certainly something we as educators should be thinking about being involved in.


In this tutorial I'd like to show you how to create your own social network on Ning, just by following 7 steps. I've published these as a downloadable PDF with screen shots, so that you can print them up and follow them / share them.

• 7 steps to creating a social network>> (944k pdf)
  

Perhaps though, more importantly it's worth thinking about some of the issues, and pros and cons surrounding the use of social networks.

Some advantages of creating your own network.

• Control over the content
  You can make sure nobody posts anything inappropriate or irrelevant.
  
• Control of who joins and the ability to block or ban people
  You can protect your members, ban anyone who doesn't behave or just limit membership to people you want to invite.
• Increased reach
  You can increase the reach of your F2F activities and get more people involved in the collaborative / collective development of your project.
  
• Good for your personal / career development
  You can learn a lot through being an administrator and develop some useful skills and knowledge.
  

Things to consider before you launch your network

• Closed (just people you invite) or Open (anyone who wants to join)
  I would advise starting off with just people you invite first to see how things take off. Deciding to make the network open could take a lot of consideration and demand much more 'policing' moderation from you.
  
• Do you have the time to manage the network?
  This is always a key question for teachers. Keeping the network active and up to date is going to take time. If you don't have the time / resources to put into it, best not to start.
  
• Do you have or can you find content to input to the network?
  Content is still the main motivation for teachers / students to get involved, even if it's just as stimulation for communication / collaborative work, you need to have something to offer and your members are going to need to 'get something' from visiting your network, or they won't be coming back.
  
• How / Will you be able to nurture collaboration between the members?
  Bit like the point above. Just providing a network isn't going to create collaboration. Ning is just a platform, you have to provide reasons, tasks, activities for members to collaborate on, or it just won't happen.
  
• What functionality (groups, forums, video and photo sharing) do you want to make available?
  Providing all of these on Ning is easy, but don't provide anything you can't use. If you provide the ability to share photos / videos, make sure you have something to share and reasons for sharing those things. You'll also need to think about who can share add and create. Are you going to keep complete control or share it with your members?
  
• Will you want to include advertising or ask it to be removed?
  If you are using Ning for educational purposes you can contact them and ask for advertising to be removed. You can also pay for a Ning platform and generate some money from the advertising yourself. I wouldn't recommend this as the amount may well not justify what you have to put up with from the advertisers. It's also better to get the advertising removed before you invite people to join, as some of the links can be inappropriate.
  
• What information will you want members to add when joining?
  You can decide what information members need to submit when they join and decide who sees the information. You find out a lot about them this way, but people can be put off by having to give away their information, so it could be best just to let them decide.
  
• How long will you want to keep the network live? (limited period or indefinitely)
  If you only intend to use the network for a specific time limited project it might be good to make this clear to your members, so they keep records of anything they develop within the network. Then when the project ends you can delete it with a clear conscience and keep the web tidy.

Looking at other networks
Before you start your own social network it's a good idea to have a look round at what others are doing. You might get some good ideas, see some potential pitfalls you want to avoid, or even decide someone already has your area covered and just decide to join them instead of recreating the wheel. Here a four networks for teachers that are well worth checking out.

• Mexico English Teachers' Alliance
  http://metamexico.ning.com/
• Teachers helping teachers
  http://teachershelpingteachers.ning.com/
• EFL Classroom 2.0
  http://eflclassroom.ning.com/
• Classroom 2.0
  http://www.classroom20.com/

Evaluation criteria
Deciding whether you want to join or recommend a network can be a tricky process, but as I've been looking around for ones I want to be part of I've built up a list of criteria that I find quite useful to have in the back of my mind.

• What features / functionality does the network offer? (Groups forums etc.)
  If there's no interaction, is it worth being a part of this network?
  
• Are the groups / forums active with a number of members exchanging information?
  Just because it has them doesn't mean they are being used. Have a look and make sure there is something there to learn and somebody there to learn with.
  
• Are these features being used? (If the network offers the use of photo or video sharing is this being used?)
  This is a good place to look to see what members are really sharing. Is there original content or is it all grabbed from YouTube / Flickr?
  
• Can you find out when the network was last active?
  Some networks are still online, but have died. Either the members or creator has lost interest. No point joining an inactive network.
  
• How many members does it have?
  Open networks that only have a small number of members, may be less worthwhile. Most networks need a critical mass to keep them moving, unless the members are very committed.
  
• Are any of the members’ photographs inappropriate?
  Many people join networks to pull traffic to their / unsuitable sites. A quick look at their avatar image could well give you a clue to which these are.
  
• Check out some of the member profiles. Does the profile disclose the member’s email address or other personal info that you wouldn't want to share?
  Make sure that the network isn't forcing you to disclose more information than you would feel happy with.
  
• Are there any ‘Google Ads’ on the site? Are these suitable or potentially offensive?
  Especially when recommending networks to others, it's good to check this first.
  
• Is there any interesting content on the site?
  Again, I still believe that content is king. Content + collaboration = learning! No content, don't join.
  
• Who is behind the network?
  Always wise to know who you are dealing with and sharing your information / knowledge with. Is it a group of like minded individuals, or a faceless company with dubious motivations?
  

Why create your own network for teachers?
Some suggestions:

• To support particular dispersed groups doing specific projects / training courses
  
• To record and share examples of practice and expertise specific to their context
• To help train and develop teachers in the use of ICT / Learning Technology

Why create your own network for students?
Some suggestions:

• Class research projects – create a network for your students based around a particular theme that they need to research.
• Inter-class project – create a network for sharing information with students in another school / country.
• Create a fan site with your students dedicated to a particular celebrity they like.
• Create a site to inform visitors about Morocco / your town or city, your culture etc.
• Create an online classroom and add links to materials, activities and tasks the students should do.
• Create a network to showcase students work and keep in contact with and involve parents.

Important

• You should not use Ning with students below the age of 13.
• Always protect your members’ privacy and make sure their email isn’t displayed and they don’t share addresses or telephone numbers with people.

Well if after all this you are still interested in creating your own network, here are the 7 steps again:

• 7 steps to creating a social network>> (944k pdf)

I've created one myself for a training course for teachers that I'm involved with. Personally I've found it really valuable so far.
For more opinions and to find out about alternative platforms, visit Larry Ferlazzo's blog post on Social Networks for the Classroom

Good luck with your networking and please do use the comments below to share your experience of using social networks.

Best

Nik Peachey

Must read post by Michele Martin - Changing Knowledge Worker Attitudes. I had chills as I read it.

I believe that we have to start with making people conscious of the fact that they own the most precious resource in just about any organization today–the power of their ideas, social connections and thought processes.

That's it - knowledge workers must take ownership. And it's the responsibility of learning professionals to lead that charge. Join this discussion on Work Literacy.

Fantastic article by Nicholas Carr in Atlantic Monthly - Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains.

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I know what he's talking about. In the past, I've discussed this as Stop Reading - Skim Dive Skim. He cites a recent study by University College London that looked at behavior of visitors to two research sites. Carr states:

They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it.

The authors of the study report:

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

While Carr expresses concern about the impact that this has, I'm not quite so sure. Yes, we need opportunities to reflect, but for me that's blogging. I'm reflecting on his article as I write. But, indeed, I skimmed through passages.

Great post by Karl Kapp -Immerse Yourself in Another Language. As someone who's always felt that immersion is the best way (possibly the only way) to really learn languages. While I like the new tutoring systems such as EduFire, the idea of putting someone in a virtual environment to learn the language is fantastic.

I've mentioned before that I also think Second Life as a Learning Tool can be fantastic if you set up an environment like Plymoth Plantation - a recreation of Plymouth where actors playing the part of Native Americans and Colonists told stories and answered questions about life, religion, history, etc. It was a fantastic learning experience where you learned things in such a great way. And there were quite a few surprises, that I didn't remember ever hearing in all my different history classes. (We have a rather idealistic view of the colonists.)

I came home from the trip thinking that the California Missions should really do something similar. I've had to take my kids to a Mission several times as part of their school work and it's frankly boring to walk around reading as compared to the experience at the Plantation. Maybe one of the tribes that has casinos could sponsor putting this together?

This is good timing given the LCB Big Question is: Second Life Training.

Interesting post by Clark Quinn - Innovating by Conversation - where he refers to the idea of the Experimental Innovator - an innovator who iterates through lots of ideas before arriving at something that works. Clark tells us ...

Surowiecki’s Wisdom of the Crowds, Tapscott’s Wikinomics, and Libert & Spector’s We Are Smarter Than Me, are telling us to tap into the wisdom of crowds, and with lots of examples of how creating conversations with folks can spark new insights.

The thought this sparks is that experimental innovation can be accelerated through broader conversations. This is interesting. Much of Gladwell's discussion of experimental innovation discussed innovation occurring over very long periods of time (10 years). But one of the promises of social media is that we can arrive at innovation more quickly and test it more quickly.

In many ways, this is exactly how we are approaching Work Literacy. It's a big, hard problem. Get lot's of people together to foster discussion, innovation, experimentation.

Janet Clarey wrote an interesting blog post in response to the relatively recent edupunk meme which is basically an ideology that DIY learning and repurposing content is the way to go (and somewhat the ONLY way to go). Janet juxtaposes the recent inclusion of eLearning 2.0 type tools in Learning Management Systems against the philosophy that corporate and commercial is evil of the edupunkers. The questions she raises are:

Is the edupunk ideology saying that the use of social media in commercial learning management systems is an assault on the very philosophy of learning 2.0?

Ideologies shouldn’t be rigid should they? Rather they should be adapted and used in pragmatic ways don’t you think? If you’re a trainer embracing learning 2.0, who gives a rats ass where it lives.

These are fair questions that are also central to the issues of the Enterprise 2.0 Adoption. Corporate IT is interested in rolling out systems that they can control for security, auditing, back-up and a host of other control reasons. This is counter to the very being of a person like Stephen Downes. They would argue that the individual chooses what makes sense in their personal work and learning environment.

As a trainer, you are going to get stuck in the middle of this. If you have a population of learners who have already adopted tools (such as blogging and social bookmarking) for themselves that are different than the corporate tool (the LMS) do you ask them to move? It will depend on the content, but it certainly won't be good for the learner. If your population has not adopted a tool yet, do you have a responsibility to the individual to show them tools that can live beyond their engagement at the company? Do you show them the internal blogging tool only?

The answers are going to depend on the particular situation, but in a few cases I think the answers are fairly well known.

For Wiki-like capabilities, it likely is fine for an LMS to provide these and for learning organizations to use them. Most knowledge workers are used to thinking about that type of content being created for internal use only. It makes sense in many of these cases to keep it inside the firewall. So no problem if their Wiki is tied to the LMS. Just don't make me login to get to it. Allow it to be easily searched. Etc.

But I would claim that if you are talking about blogging as an ongoing learning and networking tool, then you are doing a disservice to learners if you show them only internal tools bundled with the LMS or any tool that is locked inside the walls of the corporation.

These are going to be real challenges for learning organizations and trainers moving forward.

Hopefully, we'll begin to see ways to allow a better handling of inside and outside the firewall solutions. For example, having social bookmarking that allows links to be kept private to a group. Interestingly when Yahoo create MyWeb as a competitor to del.icio.us before acquiring del.icious - they had features that did this. I'm expecting them at some point to put this into del.icio.us so that you can control visibility of bookmarks.

Final thought - I would claim that a bad reaction to this debate is to do nothing because we aren't sure. We need to be building work literacy. This will benefit the corporation and the individual.

Through the post on Conference Balance an in thinking about the keynotes at ASTD that I attended (ASTD Keynote - Malcolm Gladwell, Dysfunctional Teams), I realized that one of the reasons that I like going to conferences is it forces me (sometimes slowly and painfully) to get exposed to a diversity of topics. Through my PWLE methods (reading blogs, etc.) I would not have run across the concepts in Dysfunctional Teams. This was a good topic to go through and think about - and to have captured in my blog.

But, if I'm suggesting that conferences should head towards participation and F2F because more people are going to effectively get information through their PWLEs, then am I going to miss good topics like that talk. The closest equivalent are things like TED videos (which are always short and to the point). But more recently those videos have become more and more theoretical. I ran across a video on the topic of making a good presentation that was great. But, I still have this nagging worry that I would miss out if you didn't have keynotes on random, related topics.

Am I just being an Infovore and shouldn't worry about it?

Should I be seeking new information sources that will bring in random but related topics?

Where do you get this kind of information? How do you know to get it?

tag: workliteracy

Just read a great post by Clive Shepherd - Cutting the Pie - where he discusses what the appropriate balance is at conferences. As you know creating Better Conferences is something that very much interests me. Check out that post, the poll results and the discussion for lots of ideas on how to make conferences better. But Clive's major point is that at today's conferences the mix is:



His definitions are:

• ideas - presentations from gurus, experts and thought leaders, primarily abstract in nature.
• examples - case studies from users, sharing successes and lessons learned.
• participation - opportunities for attendees to interact with each other to explore the ideas, share their own experiences and make contacts that can take follow-up after the event.

He'd like to see a balance:



This is interesting timing for me having just returned from the ASTD Conference. That conference was certainly the old model - mostly ideas and examples. Very little participation. But in fairness to ASTD - it seems like it's hard to get participation when 70% of attendees are relatively new to the industry and are first time attendees.

I personally tried (a little) to create my own participation ahead of the event through getting together at conferences. But I wasn't very successful.

I've always highly encourage participation, but my general sense is that people aren't really that interested in doing the Conference Preparation that might be required to Be an Insanely Great Professional Conference Attendee or using Social Conference Tools

So while I agree, my basic question:

When can you get effective participation at conferences?

It seems like the eLearningGuild is doing a better job at this recently. There were morning discussion groups last time that I thought were great. They are starting to do more with online tools. I think that conferences really need to adopt a mentality of having unconferences within a conference structure to allow for participation of all kinds intermixed with ideas and examples.

I'd be curious to hear thoughts on this as I always struggle with whether going to a conference is worth the investment of time.

Yes and why not? Seems hard to see how this would be accomplished but it certainly does seem to be the case at the Listen and Write - Dictation website. What's more it seems to have been done in a pretty impressive way too.

This site features quite a number of audio files all of which can be accessed through quite a cleverly designed dictation activity. The users get to listen to parts of a sentence and they then have to type in the words of the sentence to a text field which only allows the words if they are correct. They are able to listen over and also get some help by setting the activity to auto complete the words as they type them in (cuts down on the frustration for EFL students of not being able to spell what you can hear).

The other nice aspect of it is that you get a score as you go and so you can work against yourself to try to improve the score.

But where's the Web 2.0 bit?
Well anyone who registers can link to an audio file for use in the activities. As a registered user you can also take on the task of adding the transcript etc. This can be a great way of sharing what must be quite a lot of work. Anyway, watch this video to see it in action.



How to use this with students

• Just your EFL students registered and sit them with some headphones to work through a few dictations
• Get your students to add some audio files that they would like turned into dictation activities
• Add some of your own audio and transcripts that you want students to work on

What I like about it

• This is really good free listening practice for students
• Great for use in a media centre or to set listening homework for students to do on their own (they can tell you their scores in class)
• Nicely designed activity with well thought out prompts
• Great that it plans to include other languages
• Great that the work load is being shared out and that users can add links to audios they want someone to transcribe
• The texts have been leveled according to difficulty

What I'm not so sure about

• I didn't manage to find a privacy policy on the site, so I wonder what they do with my info once they have it!
• Most of the texts are quite high level and grabbed from Voice of America news, so are also on some quite heavy news topics.
  
• Some more exercise types would be great, though they may be coming
• I wonder who is going to be willing to put the time into transcribing the audio files (bit cynical I know but teachers are seldom sitting around with a lot of time on their hands)

On the whole I think this is a really simple, but really great idea. This site has huge potential for language development and I hope the the people at Listen and Write can keep this going and that your students find it really useful.

Best

Nik Peachey

Lance Dublin mentioned a couple of handouts today from sessions I was not able to attend. It took me a little while to find this link to the ASTD 2008 Session Handouts. My session (yesterday) can be found: M313 - E-Learning 2.0 for Personal and Group Learning (PDF).

At the ASTD keynote by Patrick Lencioni - Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Quick search and I found some good notes on different web sites so I don't have to type so much. Here's a good one.

He used an interesting thing in order to get questions - gave free copies of his book to people with questions. He got a lot of questions right away - not sure it works all that well with an audience of 5,000.

The Five Dysfunctions of Teams are:

Absence of Trust: Trust is the foundation of real teamwork. However, in most teams members will not be "vulnerable" with each other (air dirty laundry, admit mistakes, weaknesses and concerns without fear of reprisal). Without trust the team will not be able to achieve results.

One member of a team can break down trust. You can't go into a process unwilling to get rid of any team members.

Even if it's the leader - who you must be honest with about their issues.

You should be more vulnerable - but must be genuine. Vulnerability is always a little painful. Can you be too vulnerable? No. But showing yourself as incompetent is not good either.

Fear of Conflict: Teams that lack trust are incapable of engaging in unfiltered and passionate debate about ideas. Instead, they resort to veiled discussions and guarded comments.

Productive, idealogical conflict is good. This looks different for different teams. Conflict in Japan is quite different from the US. He talked about NY vs. Silicon Valley. Not important the style that's in use, but you want to know they are engaging when they disagree.

You have to be able to disagree, even passionately.

Why don't you do it more? Fear of getting feelings hurt. His point is that if you don't have conflict around issues it will become conflict around people.

Leader must model and even mine for conflict.

Lack of Commitment: Without having aired their opinions in the course of passionate and open debate, team members rarely, if ever, buy in and commit to decisions.

Without conflict there's no commitment. He doesn't necessarily want consensus. Most times you have an important decision to make - you have to hear everyone out and then decide which one to go with. If they don't feel they've been heard, they will simply not commit.

Disagree and commit.

Avoidance of Accountability: Without commitment and buy-in to a clear plan of action, even the most focused and driven people often hesitate to call their peers on actions and behaviors that seem counterproductive to the good of the team.

Biggest problem on teams. Peer-to-peer accountability is the most powerful. If they know that peers don't buy in, then there won't be action.

Leader must be willing to confront tough problems. CEO might say - I don't have the time and energy for that. Afraid to hold people accountable for behaviors. People don't like to do these confrontational events.

Inattention to Results: Failure to hold one another accountable creates an environment where team members put their individual needs or even the needs of their division above the collective goals of the team.

What else can you focus on? Feelings. Relationships.

Healthy teams:

• Members trust one another.
• They engage in unfiltered conflict around ideas.
• They commit to decisions and plans of action.
• They hold one another accountable for delivering against those plans.
• They focus on the achievement of collective results.

Frank Nguyen is presenting at ASTD on EPSS. You can find his presentation on his site. His major points were:

• Search is not an effective method for performers to find information.
• Integrating information closer to the work flow and work interface can improve performance.
• Novices cannot effectively use the same support systems as experts.
• Providing learners with more on-the-job performance support does not eliminate the need for training and there are cases where training is preferred
• When in learning mode - people want minimal information. When in performance mode - they want more detail. Thus, you can't use the same content for both - EPSS needs more than training.
• You must focus on more than the technology in order to drive adoption of EPSS.
  

Choices for what to do as performance support vs. training:

• Routine (perform the task often) -> Training
• Not routine -> EPSS
• Critical -> Training

Only situation safe to do only support (not training), not critical, not routine.

One of the points that Frank made that I had to jump on at the session and mention Work Literacy was that even though most people know how to use Google search, they wouldn't find it to be an effective tool. I don't disagree that often search is not a great vehicle to support particular performance. However, I take issue with the claim that most people are good at using search. In fact, I would claim that most people muddle through search.

Frank is doing great research in this area. Really enjoyed his relaxed presentation style and his method of engaging the audience around key questions.

Next up at ASTD - Malcolm Gladwell - new book in November - Outliers - how people get to be successful. Talks about two kinds of creative styles:

• Experimental innovator - never has a big bold idea, works slowly, trial-and-error, empirical, approach master
• Conceptual innovator - big idea, can execute it themselves

He draws this distinction in artists, writers and the point is that it applies to any kind of field.

We have a tendency to value the conceptual innovator more than the experimental innovator. He spends about 10 minutes to show this through discussion of Fleetwood Mac vs. the Eagles and how the music industry focuses on conceptual innovators today.

Compares scouting combines in sports to how you select talent. Break down into specific skills and measure against those skills. He claims that scouting combine scores have almost no correlation to actual abilities. In the NBA, Kevin Durant - 75 out of 81 people in combines, but he was rookie of the year. Very little correlation. Similar issue of intelligence tests in the NFL. I have to check his facts - Bradshaw, Marino, McNabb all scored among the lowest on intelligence?

Interesting to juxtapose this versus the discussion of talent management by Tony Bingham. Talent management likes to look at things exactly this way.

Gladwell's claim is that you really want to find an experimental innovator in sports or other talent - who is going to grow into a star. Some of his main points:

• Talent is not a narrow, fixed thing.
• Picking talent requires judgment - hero of stories are those that can see future talent
  
• Along the way, talent will make a lot of mistakes
• Flexibility is required to be successful growing talent
• Measures (if they can even be done) must be much broader than simple skills measurement
• Must be patient
• Must be prepared to help
  

Commentary - the problem here is that in the fast paced world with a fluid flow of talent that we have today, how do you balance the need for immediate performance versus the need to be patient, develop over time, etc. To me a key aspect that is missing here is the transition of thinking about the corporation as being the key talent manager - that has moved to the individual. The corporation still has responsibility, but the individual has greater responsibility.

When you think about the parallel of this with the sports world - it's pretty close. Listen to any sports talk radio and they will talk about how you can try to draft for players who will have immediate impact or those who may develop into a bigger, more valuable player. There's a definite trade-off to be made in that choice. It's a tough choice to make. And the right answer is situational. Sometimes getting the lineman who will make immediate impact is a better choice than drafting a quarterback who may or may not develop into a star in three years.

I wish we could have had some discussion with Gladwell vs Bingham. Could have been pretty interesting.

I'm at the ASTD Conference in San Diego at the general session. It looks like there are about 5,000 people in the room. A complete guess at the number, but pretty good size.

Tony Bingham, ASTD CEO, is talking about and showing videos around talent management. It's interesting to see the message be around talent management when often that's fairly separate from the learning function. My experience is that talent management is more focused on performance review, succession planning, recruitment, retention, and other HR processes - less on specific learning / development. I've got to say that having someone showing a bunch of videos (of people from the BEST winners) isn't all that engaging or meaningful without more context.

Tony asked the audience - how many know the key strategies of your organization and then key metrics of your business. Very few (10 percent) raised their hands.

Tony's Keys at the end of his presentation:

• Create a Learning Brand
• Learning - most important role is in talent management
• Take Action on the Skills Gap
• Become a business partners

Great quote in one of the videos - self-development is the greatest challenge. It's often easier to change the world than it is to change yourself. Okay - maybe I was too hard on the videos. :)

I'm very happy to announce that Michele Martin and I have just launched Work Literacy - a network of individuals, companies and organizations who are interested in learning, defining, mentoring, teaching and consulting on the frameworks, skills, methods and tools of modern knowledge work.

This venture comes partly from my experiences doing presentations, workshops, blogging around eLearning 2.0. When discussing new(ish) tools like blogs and social bookmarking, and discussing things like advanced search techniques, there's a gap in knowledge work skills. In fact, we all have blind spots. Why is that? It's just coming at us too fast to continue to acquire in an ad hoc fashion. We need something to help us make sense of all that is happening that changes how we do our knowledge work.

Our goal is create a vibrant network of individuals, companies and organizations interested in participating in a variety of ways: learners, testers, experts, teachers, coaches, and I'm sure many others. The network is intentionally defined in a way that will allow it to emerge over time, but there are some very interesting people involved already.

Some ways to Participate:

• Subscribe
  • RSS Feed for the Work Literacy Blog
  • RSS Feed for an aggregation of related content.
  • You can subscribe by email using the entries in the sidebar to either of these feeds.

• Answer a poll on work skills opportunities.

• Point us to resources using the Del.icio.us tag: WorkLiteracy
  

• Comment

• Blog your thoughts. When you blog, include the term workliteracy or better yet a link to www.workliteracy.com and we’ll do our best to aggregate these posts for access by the community.

I truly believe this is something important, and I hope it sounds interesting enough that you want to come participate with us.