It's time for another edition of the Learning and Development Roundup! (See also previous editions at the archive page.)
Plenty of Industry Data Around this time of year, several updated industry reports typically surface to give learning professionals a fresh high-level look at the Learning and Development industry.
Training magazine released its 29th annual “Training Industry Report,” and a summary was published in the November/December issue.
The latest IDC survey of Chief Learning Officer magazine's Business Intelligence Board (BIB) focused on where companies are investing their training dollars in learning technology and learning services areas and whether spending on training will increase or decrease from 2010 to 2011. Cushing Anderson reported on the results in "Where CLOs Are Spending" in the magazine’s November issue.
Training's Top 125 Announced Similarly, another Learning and Development annual tradition is Training magazine's announcement of the “Training Top 125 winners." Now in its 11th year, at this time they have announced only the 125 finalists, as the actual rankings will be revealed at the Training 2011 Conference & Expo, February 7-9 in San Diego, California.
Questions No Longer Being Asked The November ASTD Learning Circuits "Big Question" was "What questions are you no longer asking? What are your new questions?" This inherently provocative subject was actually triggered by an earlier posting by George Siemens at his blog, elearnspace, where he provided six questions in the realm of learning and development that no longer interest him. The post by Siemens generated many comments, and the similar Big Question posted at Learning Circuits produced blog responses from a half-dozen industry bloggers. Clive Shepherd in particular provided an interesting take, noting both questions he is no longer asking and related questions that he is still asking.
The Latest on Mobile Learning This year has seen increasing interest in mobile learning -- leveraging the many mobile devices in our lives for learning and development purposes. Here are some of the best writings on this subject from recent weeks.
Designing mLearning -- A new website to accompany Clark Quinn's forthcoming book of the same name. See also this recent blog post from Quinn, an extended abstract of a talk on mobile learning he delivered at the ONLINE EDUCA BERLIN conference.
The ADL Mobile Learning newsletter -- Do you keep up with this weekly collection of resource links? The newsletter describes itself as: "Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) weekly report on news and findings of interest related to mobile learning in the military."
"Are Apps the Future of e-Learning?" -- A blog post from Clive Shepherd, where he considers mobile apps for learning and development from several perspectives: viewing content, creating content, collaborating with peers, collaborating live, and performance support.
The Latest on Social Learning There continues to be a great flow of good articles, blog postings, and resources on this popular and important subject, so I will again list a few of the best from recent weeks here.
"Where Social Learning Thrives" -- A blog posting from Marcia Conner, where she describes the kind of culture needed in an organization before social learning will truly flourish.
"Get Serious About Social Learning by Focusing on What Matters" -- An article by Eric Davidove at Learning Solutions Magazine, where he stresses the importance of looking beyond the technologies involved in social learning, and emphasizes the critical importance of solid "strategy formulation, community design, rewards and incentives, content quality, and benefits tracking."
"What Constitutes a Social Learning Culture?" -- A blog post by Sumeet Moghe, where he considers why social learning generally works so well at his company (ThoughtWorks). He even abstracts from these insights specific questions for you to ponder when considering your own organization's culture.
"Twas the Night Before Social Media" -- Given the holiday season, it seems appropriate to end this Roundup with David Kelly's insightful, humorous, and all-around brilliant twist on a classic.
Updates from Element K As usual, I'll end this roundup posting with links to our newsletter service that we launched last year. Each newsletter includes several articles of relevance to the Learning and Development field, as well as updates about Element K events and our latest product releases. You can see the latest newsletters here: September, October, November, and December.
Nearly everybody loves a good quotation. I don't mean the commonplace, tiresome, boring, or cliché quotes -- but truly good, powerful, inspiring, or thought-provoking quotes. And this desire for pithy wisdom is certainly not lessened by the emergence in recent years of technologies that encourage short messages, such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. People share a lot of things using these kinds of services (and their private Enterprise 2.0 cousins), ranging from personal comments and opinions, to links to blog postings or articles, and yes -- good quotations.
For the past couple of years I've been collecting quotations related to the Learning and Development field. Some are focused on formal training, some on education and learning in general, and others are more narrowly focused on a particular sub-topic of interest to me. I consult this collection of quotes for many reasons: to find that perfect, thought-provoking line for use in a conference or webinar presentation; to share with others via Twitter; or perhaps most importantly, to simply provide myself regular inspiration before or after a long day.
With so many of these favorite quotations piling up in my personal collection, I thought I'd share a selection of twenty of them with you here. In a few cases, I’ll explain briefly what I find so valuable or interesting about the particular quotation -- your mileage may vary of course.
I’ll start off with this classic:
In times of change, learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists. -- Eric Hoffer
This is a classic statement of the need to "learn how to learn," rather than (only) stuffing one's head full of facts and procedures that can become outdated. Of course, some amount of factual knowledge is needed to live, to do one's job, and so on, but maintaining and improving your ability to learn more in the future is also critical.
To conserve a physical resource, you must limit its use. To conserve knowledge, you must increase its use. -- Unknown
This is a great retort to anyone who persists in "knowledge hoarding" in your organization, or who advocates systems that will clearly result in the same. Knowledge at Element K has been significantly conserved in the past four years since we started implementing internal Web 2.0 tools, such as Wikis, as more flexible knowledge bases than we had previously.
We complain that learners want to be spoonfed, but then we won't let them hold the spoon. -- Jane Bozarth, via #lrnchat on Twitter
Learning professionals need to consider the right balance between control (of tools, of learning content, and more) and freedom for the people using their services. You should consider carefully how much you complain about something you are partially the cause of.
Some additional classic quotations in this general area (with similar sentiments often being said by multiple sources):
Where my reason, imagination, or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn. -- Winston Churchill
I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught. -- Winston Churchill
Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know. -- Daniel J. Boorstin
Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. -- John Dewey
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. -- William Butler Yeats
The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change. -- Carl Rogers
An organization's ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage. -- Jack Welch
Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand. -- Chinese Proverb
The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires. -- William Arthur Ward
Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. – Gandhi
Learning is like rowing upstream; not to advance is to drop back. -- Chinese Proverb
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit. -- Aristotle
Some other favorites have a bit of a humorous aspect, such as this one:
If you question training, you only train yourself in asking questions. -- The Sphinx, from the movie Mystery Men
I've always loved this line, one of many deep-sounding statements from this character in the film. In a certain context, one can question training, for example, where formal training is not a good solution for the problem at hand. But in other contexts this is a pretty profound quip: if you do not seek out training/learning/education, you will remain ignorant and full of questions.
And a few more quotations that are both enlightening and clever:
Bad training is a monologue delivered in the presence of hostages. -- Sardek Love
The only thing worse than learning from experience is not learning from experience. – Unknown
Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival. -- W. Edwards Deming
I'll close this collection with one of my own. You've probably heard of the philosopher Rene Descartes's famous line "I think, therefore I am" (first written in French, and then later as the famous Latin dictum "Cogito ergo sum.") He used that in the context of trying to provide a firm footing for knowledge, starting with the philosophical question of his own existence. He was noting that if you were to wonder whether or not you exist, you have by that very act alone proved that you do exist (you are the "I" who is doing the thinking).
Without delving further into Descartes' use of this famous phrase, I'll note that I've often flipped it around to make a normative suggestion, both to myself and others: "I am, therefore I should think!" In the context of education, learning, and development, I'll take it one step further, and substitute learning for thinking:
I am, therefore I should learn!
So what about you? What are your favorite education, learning, and development quotations?
The American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) is again celebrating employee learning in organizations with their Employee Learning Week (ELW) program from December 6-10, 2010. As their website states, "Employee Learning Week is an awareness campaign highlighting the important connection between learning and achieving organizational results." Learning and training are more important now than ever before, as "the growing skills gap and the increased need to compete in today's economy require organizations to develop a knowledgeable and highly skilled workforce."
All organizations are encouraged to participate, and ASTD provides a list of tips and ideas for making your ELW efforts a success:
Work with members of your ASTD chapter to pilot a PR campaign targeted to business leaders and learning professionals in your community.
Institute an employee development recognition event for individuals and departments in your organization.
Introduce new learning opportunities during the week.
Work with government officials to pass a proclamation recognizing Employee Learning Week.
Communicate learning and development tips to your workforce each day of the week.
Host a press briefing with the local media.
Host a program with a local university or community college.
Help employees create individual development plans to increase and enhance their skills.
Submit an article about your company's learning efforts to a local newspaper.
Keep in mind that learning initiatives can be relatively informal activities. As an example, my local ASTD chapter (Genesee Valley ASTD, which is the greater Rochester, NY area) will be hosting a social networking event, during ELW and we'll be sharing productivity tools and tips to give each other new things to explore in 2011.
So what is your organization doing to celebrate Employee Learning Week?
I'll note that your organization can be designated an ASTD "Champion of Learning" by participating in ELW. See what some of your Learning and Development peers did in 2009 (PDF) to showcase their ELW efforts!
It's time for another edition of the Learning and Development Roundup! (See also previous editions at the archive page.)
Jane Hart's Top Tools for Learning for 2010 Jane Hart's annual list, "Top 100 Tools for Learning," is now complete, and she has posted this year’s results online. As she has done in previous years, she has provided the complete list of results and also created a SlideShare presentation. This year she had more contributions than ever -- a total of 545 from learning professionals worldwide. Interestingly, the top tool from 2009 retained its crown: Twitter. Seven of the top ten from 2009 remained in the top ten for 2010, though rankings shifted up or down for each. Newcomers to the top ten this year are Skype at 6th place, Facebook at 9th, and Moodle at 10th. Hart has analyzed the results further by providing the following three resource pages:
Elliott Masie Launches a New E-Book Elliott Masie and The MASIE Center have published a free, Open Source book for and by learning professionals titled "Learning Perspectives: 2010." The book includes contributions by 40 global learning leaders, and its articles cover a wide range of viewpoints and perspectives on the changing nature of learning. It includes articles from both Learning and Development veterans such as Allison Anderson, Larry Israelite, and Nigel Paine, as well as new voices coming from their "30 Under 30 Learning Leaders." Contributors come from organizations such as Google, Intel, Lockheed Martin, Accenture, Alliance Pipeline, Farmers Insurance, Veterans Administration, Cleveland Clinic, CNN, Liberty Mutual, CIA, and Luxottica.
Jane Bozarth on Accessibility and Evaluating E-Learning Jane Bozarth's two most recent “Nuts and Bolts” columns at Learning Solutions Magazine are again excellent reads. In "How to Evaluate e-Learning," Bozarth provides and summarizes the approaches of Kirkpatrick, Brinkerhoff, and Stufflebeam, and urges instructional designers and training practitioners to stop treating evaluation as an afterthought and choose the approach that is most relevant to your specific needs. In "Do You See?" Bozarth then tackles another common subject in e-Learning design and development: the issue of designing content that is accessible to all. She focuses on the issue of the use of color in e-Learning content, and gives instructive examples that demonstrate best practices designers should be following.
More on the Great LMS Debate Back in June of this year, I wrote a posting titled "The Great LMS Debate," which noted a growing debate in the Learning and Development industry about the future of Learning Management Systems (LMS). I linked to several prominent thought leaders who had shared their perspectives on this timely subject from a variety of viewpoints. One thing is certain: the debate is far from dead, as noted by the October issue of Chief Learning Officer magazine, which included the article "Is the LMS Dead?" by Ed Cohen.
The Need for a Core Set of Flexible Skills Charles Jennings makes a persuasive case that we need to help workers develop a core set of flexible skills in his article "Key Skills for High Performance" in the Fall issue of Training Industry Quarterly. The skills he focuses on include search and "find" skills, critical thinking skills, creative thinking skills, analytical skills, networking and people skills, and logic skills. I've been arguing for much the same thing to anyone who will listen for a long time, and not just noting this need for corporate learning, but arguing that much of these same skills need to be focused on in the K-12 education system as well. This has long been true, and Jennings is correct to note that these needs are becoming ever more intense because of the Internet and the ubiquity of content and information.
The Latest on Mobile Learning This year has seen increasing interest in mobile learning -- leveraging the many mobile devices in our lives for Learning and Development purposes. Here are some of the best writings on this subject from recent weeks.
The Latest on Social Learning There continues to be a great flow of good articles, blog postings, and resources on this popular and important subject, so I will again list a few of the best from recent weeks here.
"E-learning Goes Social" -- by Anne Pauker Kreitzberg and Charles B. Kreitzberg, in the Sept/Oct. issue of Elearning! Magazine. Points out several common areas of resistance to social learning, and gives ten tips to getting started.
Updates from Element K As usual, I'll end this roundup posting with links to our newsletter service that we launched last year. Each newsletter includes several articles of relevance to the Learning and Development field, as well as updates about Element K events and our latest product releases. You can see the latest newsletters here: August, September, October, and November.
During a recent customer event, someone noted what many of us have experienced in recent years: change is increasing. I then went further, and noted that the rate of change is increasing--that what we are seeing actually is an "increasing increase." And this is important, because most humans can deal with a certain amount of change, but if the rate of change continues to increase, things can quickly get out of control and feel overwhelming.
This concept of an "increasing increase" is something I use increasingly often (pardon the pun) in describing various dynamics of modern life. It comes from mathematics, with the following simplistic graph representing the notion: as time goes on, you get ever more of whatever is being measured by the vertical axis. That is, the "steepness" of the curve is increasing.
The concept of "increasing increase" is of course one of a set of four such concepts, with the others being: decreasing increase, increasing decrease, and decreasing decrease. Hopefully you can visualize what the graphs for each of those would be like without too much imagination required.
Regarding increasing increases, in addition to the rate of change in organizations or life in general, another obvious use of the concept is regarding our rapidly increasing access to information. If you are like me, in the past 15 years, the Internet in particular has led you to be bombarded with ever more information from an ever-increasing number of sources. I now get loads of valuable information from not only traditional sources such as books, newspapers, magazines, and television, but also blogs, Twitter, social networking services, and much more. I've actually had to (several times) consciously re-jigger my information "diet plan" if you will, to make sure I'm not overwhelmed by it, not getting duplicate information unnecessarily, and making the best use of my time.
Another example is complexity in modern life -- at times this also feels like an increasing increase. How many of you have experienced this in regards to a particular project at work? It starts out with a particular goal or objective, but then when you start digging into the requirements and the project plan, new objectives develop. Whether you thought of it this way or not, at some point that growing complexity was an increasing increase.
The same can arise with customer service departments, where you track the number of customer calls, issues, complaints, resolutions, etc. on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. These will vary over time, as new products or services are rolled out, become well understood by customers, and so on. But what you want to avoid as a customer service manager is seeing a curve like the one shown above -- an increasing increase of complaints or defects. Ideally, you'll see an increasing decrease instead (complaints about something new that perhaps start out significant, but later rapidly approach zero), or at least a decreasing decrease (complaints that decrease rapidly at first, and then level off to an acceptable level).
When considering things that can spiral out of control for you, in life or business, the earlier you can identify that a trend is an increasing increase, the easier it will be to alter. Once that curve gets steep, you'll be floundering to just keep up (with the changes, with the information coming in, with the customer service issues, or whatever).
So what can you do to keep a handle on any such increasing increases? First, developing the ability to recognize them early is of course critical. But beyond that, be as prepared as possible, by taking advantage of the many learning and development opportunities you have. For instance:
A well-trained project manager will be better able to identify and handle the increasing complexity of a project.
The more knowledge, skills, and experience that a programmer has, the more likely they can handle an increasing increase in code requirements.
The more expertise that a security expert has, the better they are able to deal with an increasing increase in security threats to a network, or the increasing increase in the number of mobile devices their constituents want to use.
I'm sure you can think of many other instances in your organization where learning and development opportunities can be critical in preparing your people for the inevitable increasing increases they will face on the job. Are you supporting them well with the best classroom, e-Learning, and performance support opportunities that you can, to keep them from being overcome by the increasing increases in their lives?
In the past several years, in the area of "social" tools and technologies, I've witnessed the rise and fall of various related concepts and terms, both in the Learning and Development industry and in the business world more broadly. By "rise and fall," I don't mean to imply that the popular early terms were in some way incorrect -- they are still valid concepts and still get used when appropriate. Rather, I'm referring to the evolution of what we as an industry are comfortable talking about, and what we feel best captures the points we are trying to make at that moment. Let me spell out how I've experienced this over the past four years, and see if you've seen the same trends. Then, let's speculate about what might come next and why.
Several years ago, learning professionals followed the broader trend and adopted the term Web 2.0 to describe Internet technologies that provided for much greater two-way interaction, collaboration, knowledge sharing, and so on. There had always been some of this on the Internet (e.g., discussion boards, newsgroups, guestbooks, and so on), but as blogs, wikis, modern discussion forums, and eventually social networking sites and social messaging services (e.g., Twitter) arose to great prominence, the term "Web 2.0" became a crucial concept -- and at times, an over-used buzzword.
But "Web 2.0" as a term had a few problems for those not at the forefront of this trend. For one thing, on its own it doesn't convey its meaning in a transparent way: the "2.0" just indicates some sort of evolution or change from the past, but what has changed exactly? After all, during the same time that things like blogs and wikis arose, e-commerce continued to grow rapidly--so someone not in the know might wonder if "Web 2.0" was referring to e-commerce rather than collaborative, social technologies. Further, "Web 2.0" has a certain awkwardness to it when trying to describe the use of these kinds of collaborative technologies used privately, inside an organization. In such cases, you typically are using the same underlying tools as the public counterparts (a web browser, HTML, etc.), but you are accessing forums and blogs and so on that are on an internal network. Therefore, the use of "Web" in "Web 2.0" can for some be a bit confusing.
For these and other reasons, many started to refer to these technologies more often as social media rather than "Web 2.0." This was clearer on both counts mentioned above: the word "social" captures the direction of the technological evolution, and it was less awkward when describing internal technology use.
Our terminology evolved further as many in the industry started to notice that this evolution was potentially an even bigger change than initially considered. The concept of Enterprise 2.0 is used to capture this notion: the use of social media, whether internal or public, can radically alter many if not all aspects of modern enterprise organizations. Some of the changes will be unexpected; some will be hard to manage. But the effects will be far-reaching--and have been so at many organizations that are at the forefront of implementing the cultural changes and new tools that "Enterprise 2.0" involves.
More narrowly, in the Learning and Development field, we naturally wanted to consider "social media for learning and development" contexts. That is too wordy to bandy about very often, so for a while we suffered through the temporary use of Learning 2.0 as an industry term. Thankfully, we seem to have quickly evolved beyond that to the now popular term social learning.
There are two new and powerful books in this area that use these terms in line with my evolutionary story here. The first is Social Media for Trainers, by Jane Bozarth. Here Bozarth is specifically considering the use of social media technologies (internal and external to the organization) in the context of training. Hence the term "social media" makes the most sense in her title.
The other is The New Social Learning, by Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner. Here the authors correctly note that "social learning" as a concept is broader than, and pre-dates, the use of social media tools to enable learning, but that what is "new" is just how powerful the use of the new tools is in this regard. Hence they present it as the "New Social Learning." Simple and clean, and right on target. In the diagram below, it is the intersection that represents the "new" social learning:
I suspect that the term "social learning" -- whether properly defined as Bingham and Conner do, or more loosely used to refer to the use of social media in learning and development contexts -- will be a concept and term we will be using for many years to come. It has legs, and represents an important trend in our industry, not a mere fad.
That said, I wonder if this terminology evolution will continue, and what will the next terms be? Here are some candidates. I'm specifically wondering if leadership in organizations, the C-suite and the finance folks, will not always "get" the value of "social learning," and consider it too flimsy and vague of a term. If they refuse to fund the important shift to greater informal and social learning, then the learning and development professionals who believe in the powerful value of social media and social learning will need, to some degree, to "re-brand" what they are recommending the organization adopt. They could fall back on "Enterprise 2.0", which has the advantage of being broader than L&D, but this has the same lack of clarity in direct meaning "Web 2.0" suffers.
Another approach would be to accept that "learning" is not the ultimate goal. Keep the term "social," but replace "learning" with concepts that better capture the real goal, such as “social performance improvement” perhaps?
I've also heard industry experts suggest that with some leaders you may need to swap out "social" for another term, such as "collaborative,” "collective,” or “shared.” So then we might evolve to "collaborative performance improvement" (although CPI in the USA is already a common acronym, for Consumer Price Index!).
What do you think? Have you had success recommending "social learning" or "Enterprise 2.0" as important initiatives in your organization? Or have you evolved your terminology to something else that is more attractive to your leadership? If not "social performance improvement," what do you see as the next--more ultimate-ends and results-focused--term we'll all be using?
I regularly attend and speak at various conferences in the Learning and Development industry (see this blog's Industry Events category for other conference reports). Recently, I attended a different sort of conference, one for leaders from the many local American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) chapters around the country. It was called the "ASTD ALC" or Chapter Leaders Conference (see their FAQ for details). The purpose of the event is for current leaders of these chapters to network with each other to share ideas, best practices, and lessons learned to improve the efficacy and value of each chapter.
This year, I joined the Board of Directors of my local ASTD Chapter, the Genesee Valley chapter (for those not from upstate New York, that is basically the greater Rochester area). As a newcomer with a lot to learn, I volunteered to attend this conference, and I was fortunate to be one of two board members to represent our chapter at the event.
Did you know there are some 130 ASTD chapters around the U.S.? (Find your closest local chapter here.) As a result, the annual ALC is pretty well attended by several hundred highly enthusiastic learning professionals. And with so many talented people, it was no wonder that the conference had a full schedule of presentations to choose from, with plenty of advice available in all the major areas of concern to a chapter, such as programs, membership, finance, and so on (see the program and handouts). There was also a solid lineup of keynote speakers, including Ed Betof (author of Leaders as Teachers), Jack Phillips (of the ROI Institute), Anne Bruce (an author and life coach), and ASTD's CEO and President, Tony Bingham.
Although I might be biased, I think one of the best presentations of the conference was that of my fellow-GVASTD member Robert Whipple. Bob is a leadership consultant, and author of such books as Leading with Trust is Like Sailing Downwind, The Trust Factor: Advanced Leadership for Professionals, and Understanding E-Body Language: Building Trust Online. His presentation at ASTD ALC 2010 was titled "Duck Soup: Seven Habits of Award-Winning Chapters." And as the title indicates, Bob did the presentation dressed as, and channeling the humor and personality of, Groucho Marx. His presentation was full of great tips on how GVASTD became an award-winning chapter, including the importance of president succession planning, having a high level of trust amongst board members, the benefits of community partnering, and much more. But interspersed in his presentation were dozens of classic Groucho jokes, a secret word with a prize, novelty cigars, and other Groucho fine touches. He did an outstanding job in all respects, and left the audience tired from laughter but also well educated on how to improve their local ASTD chapters.
Beyond the keynotes, I attended many other valuable sessions:
Anne Scott from the Smoky Mountain chapter shared numerous tips on how ASTD chapters can best use webinars to supplement their regular face-to-face events. I walked away with many tips that will be helpful both to GVASTD and the webinars we do at Element K.
Kristen Fyfe and Colleen Raezler from ASTD gave a great overview of Employee Learning Week (ELW). They shared many examples of how both local chapters and corporations and other organizations have leveraged ELW to draw attention to the importance of training and other learning and development needs and programs. This year Employee Learning Week is December 6-10, and you can learn more about it at http://www.employeelearningweek.org/.
Lida Pinkham of the Central Indiana chapter gave a presentation on social media. She began with a very innovative approach, one that I might emulate in the future. Since many in the room were Twitter novices, she eased people into the concept with a paper-based exercise that explained the overall idea of Twitter, and got them well on their way to using it (some felt so comfortable that they actually created accounts and started tweeting during the session).
Just as entertaining as Robert Whipple playing Groucho, Patrick O'Malley of the Boston chapter, gave an outstanding--and hilarious--presentation on marketing using social media. If you ever have a chance to hear Patrick speak, don't miss it. He gave us loads of advice on how to use LinkedIn, YouTube, and so on--again, tips I can use in support of both GVASTD as well as Element K.
Beyond the sessions, I was pleased to be able to re-connect with many folks I've met at other industry events, and also to meet for the first time in person many learning professionals who I know from Twitter or other online venues. One such person, Cindy Huggett, received a much-deserved standing ovation from the crowd in recognition of her tireless work as head of the National Advisors for Chapters.
For another perspective on this conference, see the detailed reports at David Kelly's new blog, "Misadventures in Learning" (Part 1 and Part 2).
Lastly, if you are a learning professional but are not actively involved in your local ASTD chapter, what is stopping you? I encourage you to check them out--attend an upcoming presentation or networking event, visit their website to learn more about what they offer, and consider becoming a member. Doing so will not only help support the learning and development industry in your local area, but you’ll be supporting yourself as well!
It's time for another edition of the Learning and Development Roundup! (See also previous editions at the archive page.)
Measuring the Impact of Learning and Development Two recent items of note on the always challenging issue of measuring the impact of training, or learning and development activities more broadly. First, Josh Bersin's August column in the August issue of Chief Learning Officer magazine, "A Memorandum on Metrics," describes three trends found through his firm's ongoing research on training measurement. These describe the continuing challenge that good measurement continues to pose for most organizations, the fact that the tools available continue to change (forcing organizations to adopt a variety in an attempt to obtain a complete picture), and lastly, the need to expand measurement initiatives to include informal learning.
The second recent article is "ROE's Rising Star: Why Return on Expectations is Getting So Much Attention," by James D. Kirkpatrick and Wendy Kirkpatrick, in the August issue of T+D magazine. This is a deeper dive on the subject, walking through what ROE is and how it contrasts with the more traditional ROI. The authors detail several key principles, including why:
The end is the beginning.
ROE is the ultimate indicator of value.
Business partnership is necessary to bring about positive ROE.
Value must be created before it can be demonstrated.
A compelling chain of evidence demonstrates your bottom line value.
How Long Does it Take to Create Learning? As noted in my previous roundup, Bryan Chapman recently performed a survey of the Learning and Development industry, asking how long it takes to develop various kinds of learning content. This was an update to his earlier survey results from several years ago. The results are now in, and he has provided them in a presentation hosted at SlideShare. Included are separate results for the creation of content for ILT, three levels of e-Learning development, and blended learning. These are very interesting survey results, and very valuable information for all in the L&D field.
Formal vs. Informal, or a New Taxonomy for Learning? Rob Pannoni and Grant Ricketts in the August issue of Chief Learning Officer magazine wrote an interesting article titled "A New Taxonomy for Learning." I can agree with the authors that terms like formal and informal learning are used inconsistently at times in the Learning and Development industry. But with my background in philosophy, I am a stickler for clearly defining my concepts, and so I don't personally struggle with the formal vs. informal distinction and the line between them. That said, I think Rob and Grant have done us a service by clearly laying out a "new taxonomy for learning," that maps both learning modalities and organizational needs onto a two-by-two grid created by crossing organization-driven vs. learner-driven with developed resources vs. ad hoc resources. This mapping and terminology is easy to understand and I think should be helpful for many L&D professionals.
Tips for Effective Online Conferences The amazingly prolific Tony Karrer recently provided two blog posts to help you create better online conferences and learning webinars. The first was "19 Tips for Effective Online Conferences" and the other is a list of links to other resources, "Effective Web Conferences - 41 resources." If you have had inconsistent results with synchronous or so-called "virtual classroom" e-Learning, then these two resources should be very helpful!
The Pros and Cons of Podcasting Have you been considering the use of podcasts for learning and development? I recently described some of the many podcasts available for learning professionals, but if you are considering the use of podcasts for your own organization's L&D needs, you might find value in Mike Petersell's recent blog post "The Pros and Cons of Podcasting." Not all of his listed pros and cons will be relevant for your organization, but he provides good lists to get you started.
Rossett's Ode to Mobile Performance Support The eLearning Guild's Learning Solutions Magazine recently included Allison Rossett's article "Ode to Mobile Performance Support." In this excellent article, Rossett describes the important differences between mobile learning and mobile performance support. It is a must-read for anyone pursuing the use of mobile devices for learning and development purposes in their organization.
The Latest on Social Learning There continues to be a great flow of good articles, blog postings, and resources on this important subject, so I will again list a few from recent weeks here.
TheNewSocialLearning.com - The website for the new book of the same name, written by ASTD President Tony Bingham and consultant and social media expert Marcia Conner.
Enterprise Microlearning - Marcia Conner on the enterprise use of both Twitter and similar internal microsharing platforms.
The Evolving Social Organization - Harold Jarche gives an interesting history of enterprise evolution, describes the importance of social learning for modern organizations, and gives several examples of success stories.
Social Networking: A Platform for Training New Managers Online? - Bill Brandon considers first some history of informal learning groups from several centuries ago, and then provides insights on what makes such groups successful -- including those that are further enabled today by social media technologies.
Updates from Element K As usual, I'll end this roundup posting with links to our newsletter service that we launched last year. Each newsletter includes several articles of relevance to the Learning and Development field, as well as updates about Element K events and our latest product releases. You can see the latest newsletters here: June, July, August, and September.
When asked to name one or more good leaders, many of us would think of current or past world statesmen, people who effectively led movements near and dear to our hearts, or if you are lucky, a present or past work colleague who successfully led your organization during tough times or to new heights. But how many of us would initially think of a fictional character as a standout role model of good leadership? This is an interesting question, in part because fictional characters -- necessarily being less "three-dimensional" than real people -- can serve very well as role models. Whether in books, movies, or elsewhere, they are combinations of abstracted character traits from real people, provided to us via limited descriptions and limited dialogue and actions. Similarly, when thinking of good leadership role models (or any role models), you are focusing on abstracting the traits that make a good leader.
I've actually thought about this several times over the years, and there has always been one fictional character that I would eventually come to as my top role model for leadership. I felt rather validated when I recently learned that I'm not alone: Gina Eckert, blogging for the esteemed Center for Creative Leadership, seems to agree with me when she wrote her post "Make It So: How a Frenchman Could Become an American Leadership Idol."
The character that Gina and I are talking about is of Captain Jean-Luc Picard, from the Star Trek: The Next Generation television series and movies. The other top leaders of the various Star Trek series also have strong, though varying, leadership qualities: Captain James T. Kirk, Commander Benjamin Sisko, Captain Kathryn Janeway, and Captain Jonathan Archer. But for me and I suspect many others, Picard is the one who is the most relevant role model for leadership in organizations today. As Eckert describes him:
Picard is an excellent information gatherer and decision maker…He rarely makes real consensus decisions, but he gathers opinions from each team member before reaching an integrated conclusion, thereby giving his team the feeling of being highly involved. …Picard's appeal partly consists of his refusal to be portrayed as a hero. Picard's humility and modesty, almost shyness sometimes, make him more a member of a winning team than a solitary champion. After any threat that he and/or the Enterprise have successfully averted, he emphasizes that he is not an independent individual, able to achieve, perform, or move mountains (or rather, stars) based on his own volition. He very much defines himself as being integrated into the democratic structure of Starfleet that allows every voice to be heard, even junior ranks. …He is not so much an inspirational, visionary leader than rather a discreet operator who projects his strengths through silence. A little quirky -- but that only makes him more lovable.
And how is it that Picard is so respected as a leader even now, 20 years after his "invention?" I think mainly because his leadership style fits with the problems we're currently facing. From Picard, we can learn how to lead sustainably -- building and maintaining a high-performing team, developing others yet also retaining top talent; acknowledging people (and other species) in their entirety and caring for their emotional and physical well-being as much as, if not more than, their work output. Making moral judgments and defending them against organizational protocol, if necessary.
Admittedly, being such a leader is easier in an ideal organization like Starfleet, and in the reality of our lives we face more difficulties than Picard might --but he would argue that that should not discourage us to try and strive for continuous improvement.
I couldn't have said it better myself!
For the Star Trek fans among you, which of its characters is your favorite leadership role model, and why? And beyond the realm of Star Trek, do you have any other fictional characters that you consider to be top leadership role models?
I recently wrote a blog post titled "Podcasts in the Learning and Development Industry" wherein I described and linked to several of the more popular and valuable podcasts for learning professionals. In this post I thought I'd do something similar for free video content, going beyond the excellent videos from CommonCraft that I've blogged about here.
First I'll start with the intersection of the largest free video sharing site in the world, and the largest L&D organization in the U.S.: the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD). By now the ASTD has jumped into YouTube in a big way, using their ASTD123 channel to market their events and their broader value proposition for their members, but also as an extension of their main website to provide substantive videos with good content for learning professionals. And they do a good job, especially relative to our relaxed standards for YouTube content, at producing high-quality, professional videos. Here are some I'd like to draw your attention to:
Social Learning: Voices of Experience -- A four-part series with interviews from learning professionals who have been successful in implementing social learning in their organizations.
CPLP -- A series of anecdotes from learning professionals who have pursued and obtained their Certified Professional in Learning and Performance (CPLP) certification from ASTD.
ASTD 2010 International -- Dozens of videos about their biggest annual event, including videos of keynote speakers (like the one linked to here), but also on-the-ground interviews of participants, vendors, and others during the conference.
Interviews with Chapter Leaders at ALC -- Dozens of short anecdotes regarding the value that individuals get from being a member of he national ASTD, but also their local ASTD chapters.
ASTD Author Interview Series -- Exactly what it sounds like: authors promoting their books to learning professionals.
And that just scratches the surface of the videos ASTD has uploaded to YouTube. They also provide plenty of videos from smaller, regional ASTD events, top thought-leaders such as Marshall Goldsmith and others, and much more. In fact, to keep up with all of their videos, I recommend that you sign up to their channel as one of your YouTube subscriptions, and then create a reminder for yourself to check your YouTube subscriptions page once a week (on a Friday afternoon perhaps?) to stay current on this and any other subscriptions of interest to you.
One of the series listed above mentioned ASTD local chapters. I've searched, and I don't see very many ASTD chapters with their own, official channels on YouTube -- at least not yet. Surely that will be coming, so watch for your local chapter to see if they start to post videos. Three that have taken the plunge so far are ASTD Orange County, ASTD Fort Lauderdale, and ASTD Valley of the Sun.
Of course, many other videos of relevance to learning professionals have posted to YouTube, with clips coming from vendors, practitioners, consultants, book authors, and more. But I'd like to leave YouTube for a moment, and shift attention now to another great source of videos for learning professionals: TED. As their website describes, TED is a "small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with two annual conferences… TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Project and Open TV Project, the inspiring TED Fellows and TEDx programs, and the annual TED Prize."
On the one hand, TED conferences are relatively expensive and registration is limited. On the other hand, TED makes their videos available for free online, and they can often be some of the best educational videos you will ever see. This is because TED has done a great job of attracting high-powered, big-name speakers, and then demanding that they give engaging, and most of all, *short* presentations. Further, they are arranged by themes, with broad coverage to interest just about anyone.
The theme of most obvious relevance to learning professionals is "How We Learn." Included in this theme are several individuals I've heard as keynotes speakers at L&D industry events, such as Ken Robinson, Tim Ferriss, and Steven Pinker. Your mileage will certainly vary, but other themes that might be of interest to you as learning professionals: The Rise of Collaboration, How the Mind Works, Presentation Innovation, and What's Next in Tech. Or take a look at the current top-10 TED talks, which includes the video that first introduced me to TED a couple of years ago, a true must-see clip: "Hans Rosling shows the best stats you've ever seen."
