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I was surprised by the fear and loathing expressed around SharePoint yesterday at LearnTrends 2009.  I don’t think it’s the best tool out there, but it likely is the best tool being adopted by your IT department and is part of the Enterprise 2.0 plan in your organization.  My belief is that it’s going to be a big part of eLearning 2.0 for many workplace learning professionals.  SharePoint 2010 looks to be a much better product.

As such, I’m always looking for people who want to discuss how they are using it.  Certainly we’ll be doing more sessions like SharePoint in Corporate Learning - Free Micro Virtual Conference (see SharePoint Session Descriptions).  And I’ll continue to collect examples of how organizations are Using SharePoint.

In fact, towards that end, I would appreciate you connecting with me (email, LinkedIn) if:

• You work in an organization that is using SharePoint and might be interested in sharing how you are using it.
• You are a consultant who works on SharePoint workplace learning implementations.
• You are interested in how SharePoint can better be used in your organization.

Look forward to connecting with you.

We’ve just announced the innovation awards associated with LearnTrends 2009. The session was fraught with technical difficulties, so I thought it would be worth capturing a bit about each of the four award winners here.

CUDA Business Brain

CUDA technologies is a small software firm within the Hi Performance Learning and IQ Business Group in South Africa, the United Stated and Australia.

In 2007, they launched the CUDA Business Brain as an integrated Workplace Performance Support Solution. It provides a blend of learning management and performance support. Because they operate in bandwidth constrained locations, they have implemented an extremely light web interface. They provide automated content distribution capability. A unique a Visio enabled process publishing tool that 'walks' users through performance support when they need it. This combination, backed by flexible expert location, rating and ranking mechanisms, makes our offering stand apart in providing cutting edge performance support and learning management to large audiences.

Learnosity

Learnosity provide a set of tools to help in the assessment, teaching and learning of spoken language skills. The Learnosity system is designed for speaking, listening and learning via a mobile phone.

The use of the mobile phone allows students practice their spoken skills in and outside of the classroom, facilitating student-led learning. The use of such simple technology eliminates any required technical support in the classroom, and make the system extremely easy to use for both teachers and students. Voice-chat and text-chat facilitate structured, moderated and anonymous peer-to-peer learning.

Thinking Worlds

Thinking Worlds is a new kind of 3D “Serious Games” simulation engine and authoring tool. It provides an authoring interface that fuses a visual story boarding system with easy to follow templates, both of which require no programming skill at all. It makes it possible to develop rich simulations in a fast and cost-effective way. It publishes simulations that are both LMS and SCORM compliant. Playback is through standard technologies allowing easier distribution.

CLT Plug and Learn

CLT Plug&Learn is an interesting blended language learning course combining learning software with extensive online tutoring and regular (virtual) classroom training, framed by a placement test, a Kick-Off meeting and a final test. Based on the results of the placement test, students are offered a language course designed to meet their goals. During the self-study phase, they practice their written, reading, listening, comprehension and pronunciation skills with the language software. A tutoring team assists students via e-mail. They receive a weekly e-mail with their assignment, additional written production exercises, motivational and technical tips as well as personalized feedback based on the self-study results as recorded in the LMS.

Congratulations to the winners.

I participated in a session at DevLearn that I mentioned last week in my posts Missed Opportunities and Enough Tools for Now. The session was conducted where we broken into discussion groups around different topics each their own facilitator.

My group discussed that as learning professionals we need to put ourselves in position to be able to serve learners and internal/external clients through the best possible solution we can design and create given the constraints that exist. This might mean improving our capabilities around existing offerings. It also means getting ready to offer new kinds of solutions that are outside of what we currently deliver.

The challenge in this is:

• There’s a very wide range of possible issues that we can be presented. It’s often hard to know ahead of time what your next request will be.
• If we haven’t spent time and effort to be ready to offer a particular kind of solution, it’s harder to sell, harder to estimate, and has greater risk.
• We have limited time and resources to spend trying new things out and putting ourselves in position to deliver them when needed.

Some of the specific suggestions that were made by the group:

• Build strong internal networks and relationships in order to develop predictability and agility for the learning organization
  
• Have discussions with lots of different parts of the organization in order to have a better sense of what’s coming in the future
• Figure out what this means in terms of business / learner needs, likely requirements, and constraints
• Get the key people in the room to brainstorm potential offerings
• Build prototypes to learn and later be able to sell
• Start real small on a project with no major impact
• Learn to be a Translator – often the barrier is different language being used by different parts of the organization.
• "Sneak it in"
• Share among distributed learning organizations
• Form a framework of offerings

The nice thing about this list is that it follows a process that I recommend around defining an eLearning Strategy.

Thanks to everyone who participated in this group or helped me last week via this blog to get prepared.

Should the following Dilbert worry me about Work Literacy?

Much of the idea of Work Literacy is to help people who need to keep up with how technology impacts knowledge work.

Maybe reading blog posts about the topic is okay :)

• Tool Set 2009
• Work Skills Keeping Up
• Top-Down Strategy
• Better Memory
• Information Radar
• Processing Pages with Links
• Networks and Learning Communities
• Collaborate
• Twitter as Personal Work and Learning Tool
• Search
• Browser Short Cuts
• Work Literacy Workshop

LearnTrends 2009 starts tomorrow!  I’m really looking forward to very interesting conversations around the messy topic of convergence. 

There seems to be quite a bit of last minute registration activity.  We have over 500 attending and over 140 who say they might attend.  Should be lively.  There will be lots of time for conversation as well.  Speakers generally are scheduled for half the time and half for discussion.

If for some reason you’ve not signed up (and read my blog)...

To register, you must first register on the LearnTrends community and then register on the Conference Event Page.

Look forward to “seeing” you tomorrow.

Based on my post yesterday on Missed Opportunities, I received a really interesting email. The basic gist of the email could be summarized as:

Don’t we have enough tools for now?

At some level, this seems like a great question. We are already swimming in tools and new tools arrive faster than we can understand them much less try them. It seems somehow reasonable to simply say, let’s stop looking at new tools for a while and just get better with what we already have.

In Work Skills Keeping Up?, I discuss the Tilde Effect. And in some ways, there’s a really good point being made that there is no way we can truly keep up with the flood of tools and solutions. So, we have to make smart choices about how to stay up to speed.

Still I’ll stick with:

The bottom line for the Tilde Effect is that we live in a time of incredible innovation that directly affect the methods we use to work and learn. Our work skills cannot sit still. There's a lot of discussion about 21st century skills to be taught in schools, but what about the rest of us?

And the focus of that post is really about general metacognitive tools and methods for knowledge workers. If you are talking about tools, methods, analysis, etc. for technologies that impact learning and performance AND you believe you have a responsibility to help with design of appropriate solutions, then I don’t think you can say we have “enough tools for now.”

The better question is “How do you appropriately balance the need to stay up-to-speed with the fact that you cannot possibly spend enough time to truly stay up-to-speed?”

Back to the post from yesterday for more discussion on exactly that.

I need your help.  I’m supposed to be preparing for a panel session at DevLearn 2009.  But instead, I’m finding myself wondering what I’m going to be discussing with people.

The panel description is:

From Learning to Performance — Using Technology to Make It Happen

Thursday November 12, 2009 01:15 PM

Tridib Roy Chowdhury, Adobe Systems, Inc.

Ruth Clark, Clark Training & Consulting
David Metcalf, University of Central Florida
Lance Dublin, Dublin Consulting
Joe Ganci, Dazzle Technologies Corp.
Tony Karrer, TechEmpower, Inc.

Historically, learning departments across organizations have followed the “shiny penny.”   This high-powered panel will discuss how can one overcome this barrier to learning. You’ll discuss the key trends in technology-enabled learning such as self-service (learning by search, mobility, syndication), collaboration, etc., and learn some frameworks for execution.
In this session, you will learn:

• Why “shiny penny” is not the right approach to organizational learning
• Key trends in technology-enabled learning
• Picking the right learning strategy suited for your organization
• How organizations can adapt a productivity-oriented approach to learning technologies

Audience:
Intermediate and advanced participants should be associated with learning, training, or HR organizations at a strategic level.

Each of the panelists have been asked to prepare to lead small workgroups.  My workgroup will focus on the topic of “missed opportunities.”

So, my first question – what would you expect to discuss around the topic of missed opportunities?

 

I’m thinking that we are talking about how the ever increasing set of technologies and solutions causes us to have to continually adapt.  As soon as we feel good about our ability to build one kind of solution, we are expected to build the next.  We don’t want to just fall prey to shiny object syndrome, but at the same time, we need to be ready to deliver good solutions using appropriate technologies as they arise.

So, if that’s what I’m supposed to be talking about, then:

How do you avoid missed opportunities?  How do you stay prepared?  How are you ready when the opportunity arises?

Or at least, what might you discuss as part of this working group if you were there?

 

Please help.