Xyleme Learning Blog

“My belief is that very few people go to work to do a bad job. I’d say that 98% of people who go to work want to do a great job.” - John Catlin, CEO, TACTICS Consulting

A portion of the November 6th webinar, Reusability 2.0: Simplifying Compliance Training, included a discussion between Catlin and panel host Cushing Anderson, VP of HR for IDC, on how to make it easy for employees to do their jobs well.

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Welcome to the 6th Working/Learning blog carnival! Thanks very much to Dave Ferguson for kicking it off and letting us host it this time (more details and how you can host it, here,) and to all the very talented folks who’ve contributed the posts you’re about to enjoy. And we’re off …

• Ferguson writes about using training as a last resort after fully evaluating workflow and incentive structures so that it can be true performance support.
• Laurie Bartels writes about an expansive view of professional development that, as she quoted Elkhonon Goldberg saying, turns “neuroplasticity to your advantage.” Mmm, neuroplasticity.
• Karyn Romeis encourages people not to get so caught up in predetermined steps that they forget how much fun learning is and how much they can enjoy it.
• Ken Allan writes about the energy required for the learning process, and how it can be supplied by a teacher’s pedagogical and scaffolding techniques even for individualized elearning. And I’ve seen the truth of his conclusion in my own studies, that without the meta-cognition of what you’re building towards, as supplied by an instructor or a learner of a certain level, self-directed learning can lose focus quickly.
• Harold Jarche thinks that if mass marketing is dead, mass training will soon follow.
• Penny Ryder is interested in feedback about how to build links with her students’ parents so she can be a more effective instructor.

And … that’s it, everyone! I’ve had a great time reading through these contributions and would recommend hosting the carnival to anyone whose day is brightened when their inbox gets loaded with good reading material. See you around next time

The people who work for your organization know things that are important to the smooth working of your organization. That’s why they’re working there in the first place.

If you’ve found yourself here, you’re probably concerned with getting what they know, what you want them to be able to share with their colleagues, written and stored for easier access throughout the enterprise. Knowledge, as they say, is one of the few commodities that increases when shared.

Of course, you’ve also got to make sure that their time is spent wisely. Some organizations decide that accepting subject matter expert-generated training content in a Microsoft Word document is therefore the easiest thing to do. While the learning curve seems attractively low, there are hidden costs to the easy road.

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Blog talk never stops …

Janet Clarey: Balancing innovation and execution.

Seth Godin: Three laws of great graphs. (via)

Connectivism: Patience and elearning in Africa.

Smashing Magazine: From the wayback, but raising usability concerns about web applications is always in order.

Weblogg-ed: A little bit of considered Twitter hate centered on good questions about whether it’s actually helping drive conversation and learning or just managing to be a distraction.

eLearning Slam: Two thought-provoking posts, one on cost justifying an LMS and another on rapid course content creation.

Your choices in social and CRM technology are important, as Jay Deragon notes, because customers’ expectations are increasingly set by the social media paradigm. How will you make them?

There’s a definite ‘feel’ that social media and web 2.0 relations tend to have, so it’s important that the implementation team have people on board who understand the communication culture that customers are increasingly insisting on.

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New ideas for learning professionals and curious people …

eLearning 2.0 Technologies and Concepts: Some trends in personalized adaptive learning.

eLearning Technology: Thinking about social conference tool use and the low rate of participation for any collaborative software tool.

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No.

It’d be nice to give you better news, but the right answer is no.

You can’t always rely on user-generated content being good, promoting e-learning, or even being there at all. You can put up a great Web 2.0 tool, like a Wiki, and get nothing out of it but blank web pages.

Getting good, sustained, useful interactivity comes from setting a content baseline, having goals, and facilitating useful communication among users. Your users and employees don’t want to write for its own sake, they want to write to accomplish something.

Are they having a useful conversation or creating a reference they’re going to want to come back and use? Can they relate it to their every day tasks in a way that’s helpful, as opposed to adding extra, unwanted chores? Will they be able to reuse their content elsewhere?

Technology gets you learning tools. Engaged users give you learning communities. I think we all know which is more useful.

It all starts with the people, not the software.

From Seth Godin’s book, small is the new big:

… As we’ve turned human beings into competent components of the giant network known as American business, we’ve also erected huge barriers to change.

In fact, competence is the enemy of change!

Competent people resist change. Why? Because change threatens to make them less competent. And competent people like being competent. That’s who they are, and sometimes that’s all they’ve got. No wonder they’re not in a hurry to rock the boat. …

It’s easy to forget that learning new things and facing new challenges involves being, let’s face it, incompetent. That’s never fun. Remember when you were learning how to ride a bike? You were frustrated at first, you felt like a dolt, you had skinned knees and a bruise on your shin, you wondered if you’d ever be good at this, even though everyone told you you’d pick it up in no time.

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As everything moves online and becomes digitized, our computers and mobile devices take on more of the role of gatekeepers to our relationships with others.

Sometimes, this can make people nervous. Content management and communication technology is an increasing part of our personal conversations, our family lives, socialization with friends, every aspect of our work. It touches how our minds process what they sense. It’s easy to see why technology makes things like travel and construction better, but it isn’t always an unmixed blessing in the personal sphere.

In the learning experience, there can be natural, experience-based skepticism that more technology is the answer.

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