Dave’s Whiteboard

Nearly eleven years ago, I met Patti Shank through a listserv. I’d asked some question about training on the web. The list at the time may have had 3,000 members. I don’t remember how many replied on-list, but I still have Patti’s one-to-one reply.

Like Patti, it was candid, practical, and helpful. One resource she suggested was an HTML tutorial developed by the indefatigable Alan Levine when he was at the Maricopa Center for Learning and Instruction. It’s sort of the big brother of Stephen Downes’s explanation of how to create your own RSS feed with a text editor, a web server, and a beer.

I learned how to write HTML with the tutorial (which requires only a browser and a text editor). I don’t earn my living building web pages, but I had an immediate need, and the tutorial helped me meet and exceed it.

I mention it in part because it was then — and now — an outstanding example of a simple, effective design. The idea is that you learn HTML by building a web site about volcanoes. If you’re completely new, there’s a nice logical structure to follow.

If you’re feeling adventurous, you can skip ahead. What does the tutorial care?

Actually, it does care. It cares enough that if you jump from Lesson 6 (making lists) to Lesson 18 (spiffing up text), you’ll see this:

Objectives
After this lesson you will be able to:

• Change the size of specific portions of text in a web page
• Change the color of specific portions of text in a web page
• Create superscripts and subscripts for text in a web page
• Specify the font for portions of text on a web page

Note: If you do not have the working documents from the previous lessons, download a copy now.

(Yep, that download link in the example above works.)

So if you think you want to learn how to tinker with the appearance of text before you learn how to uses blockquotes, have at it.  But since Lesson 18 builds on previous lessons, in case you didn’t do them yet, there’s a copy of what you’ll need.

Naturally, at the end of each lesson, you can check your own work with a sample of how it should look.

I haven’t re-taken the tutorial, and I’m not trying to enlist people to take it. I just wanted to highlight a superlative example of self-paced training suitable for novices (sensible structure) and for those who’ve acquired some skill (ability to explore and do things out of sequence). And you get to decide which category suits you.

I don’t think there’s any sound. I know there’s no tracking or scoring. All the thing will do is let an interested person with a browser and a text editor create web pages.

Well, that, and occasionally challenge people who develop training.

My side trip yesterday, griping about the less-than-helpful response to a local water problem, has blossomed into a case study. From today’s Washington Post (Montgomery’s Alert System Stayed Silent):

• “…The two employees who know how to operate [the county's e-mail 'emergency alert' system] were out of town…”
• “…A third employee who was supposed to run it said that he had never been trained…”
• “…A fourth employee who was found eight hours later knew how to operate it but failed to send out any alerts.”
• “The e-mail system is the county’s primary method for contacting residents in emergencies without relying on radio or television.”

According to the county’s homeland security director, “The system worked. We failed.” He also said, according to the Post, that no employees would be disciplined but that “he would look into training issues.”

I’m not sure what “worked” — the fact that they noticed a 48-inch water main had broken?

I don’t want to pile on here. It’s more that “training” in this context is a hidden discrimination — a sort of cognitive clown car with its doors shut. We each look at it and associate it with our own particular experience of cars, not necessarily another person’s experience and not necessarily what’s in this particular car.

My hunch is that under the “training” label, you’ll find lots of things: paper-based systems rather than automatic ones, an e-mail distribution list that doesn’t include outside addresses for the sender (so he’ll know people got the alert), competing expectations, dosages of “training” given about as often as tetanus shots…

So here’s a one-page guide to performance problem analysis, just in case the cause of the problem is not restricted to a lack of skill or knowledge. (Click for full size.)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Harold Jarche, saying that learning content should be hackable, included a link to a Ruth Clark article from 2002, Six Principles of Effective e-Learning (PDF). Clark’s widely known for her research-based approach to understanding how people learn. The article’s well worth reading; this post is my summary of his six principles. First, here’s what she means by e-learning:

For the purposes of this discussion, e-Learning is content and instructional methods delivered on a computer (whether on CDROM, the Internet, or an intranet), and designed to build knowledge and skills related to individual or organizational goals. This definition addresses:

• The what: training delivered in digital form,
• The how: content and instructional methods tohelp learn the content, and
• The why: to improve organizational performance bybuilding job-relevant knowledge and skills in workers.

The multimedia principle: Adding graphics to words can improve learning.

Clark cites research showing up to 89% increase in test performance when learners studied text with graphics (compared to text alone). This makes use of the dual-encoding theory. As she points out, though, gratuitous or irrelevant graphics actually detract from learning (as many existing courses demonstrate).

The contiguity principle: placing text near graphics improves learning.

“If the words and the visuals they describe are separate from each other, the learner needs to expend extra cognitive resources to integrate them.” If layout or screen scrolling separates text from visuals, a heavier burden falls to the learner’s working memory.

The modality principle: explaining graphics with audio improves learning.

Here, again, Clark is recommending designing for optimal fit with working memory. By using both the visual and phonetic components of working memory, developers can have a more positive impact on learning. This isn’t to say you should use audio only, but rather strategically.

The redundancy principle: explaining graphics with audio and redundant text can hurt learning.

Clark’s talking about presenting text and reading it aloud at the same time, especially in the presence of visuals. For example explaining a graphic with both text and narration can overload the visual component of working memory.

I also think that most adults don’t like being read to, particularly when they can read the words for themselves. My own rules of thumb in this situation are:

• The less on screen, the more in audio. For example: if you’ve got a process diagram or an animation, don’t clutter it up with a lot of on-screen text.
• The more on screen, the less in audio. For example, say, “here’s a summary of Feist v. Rural Telephone Service.” Then keep quiet. If something was important to know before reading the summary, share that before you get to the summary.

The coherence principle: using gratuitous visuals, text, and sounds can hurt learning.

After my own high-pressure introduction to computer-based training, I decided that the worst course a person would ever develop would be the third. On the first one, you have no idea what you’re doing. On the second, you’re happy to have some idea of how to manage your tools. It’s the third one in which you go crazy.

You’ve seen the same kind of thing in PowerPoint presentations with every conceivable transition or text documents with more fonts than a Bruce Willis film has explosions.

This is a hard one for me, but I think Clark is right: this principle says that less is more when learning’s the primary goal.

[This principle also] suggests that visuals or text that is not essential to the instructional explanation be avoided. It suggests that you not add music to instructional segments. It also suggests that lean text that gets to the point is better than lengthy elaborated text.

The personalization principle: Use conversational tone and pedagogical agents to increase learning.

One intriguing finding that Clark cites: people who reviewed a program on the same computer that presented the program gave it higher ratings than people who made their evaluations on a different computer. “People were unconsciously avoiding giving negative evaluations directly to the source.”

She goes on to discuss the use of agents (e.g., a character offering learning advice). What’s key is not the appearance of the agent so much as an instructionally valid role. Does the agent offer genuine help, or just mindless promotion of the matter at hand?

Karyn Romeis asks, as part of her dissertation, how learning professionals got started with social media, and what difference it’s made. (If you’re a learning professional and are willing to have your own experience become part of her research, I’m sure she’d welcome your comments. See details at her post.)

Naturally, this seems like a great fit with this month’s Working/Learning blog carnival hosted by Rupa Rajagopalan.

How did you get started with social media?

I wanted to say “by accident,” but it’s really been an outgrowth of how I’ve worked for most of my career. I worked for GE Information Services, the company that helped invent timesharing. Our proprietary email was used by clients from Apple Computer to the Vatican.

I realize that email doesn’t strike everyone as “social software,” but it surmounted barriers of geography, making it possible to collaborate with coworkers and clients in North America, Europe, and Asia. To me, that’s the heart of social software: easy access to rapid communication between people who share some interest or issue.

What was your introduction, and how did it unfold?

If email was the start, the real intro came with GE’s use of threaded discussions, online libraries, and the online service called GEnie. As a training specialist, I participated in the alpha test, and so I’ve been connecting online via chat rooms, instant messaging, live discussion and similar channel since 1984.

Initially these were job related rather than profession related (meaning, most of the time I wasn’t dealing with other training/learning folks), but that changed over time. And, for ten years I was also a regular and active participant in the TRDEV-L (”training and development”) listserv.

All of these, which existed before Facebook, WordPress, or Twitter, supplemented and enriched more traditional professional networking offered by local chapters and annual conferences of professional associations. I made (and make) many professional and personal friends as a result of both public-forum and one-to-one backchannel exchanges.

For example, through TRDEV I met Patti Shank, who pointed me to the HTML tutorial developed by Alan Levine, which was how I learned not only to use the web but to create my own content for it. And a little over two years ago, I started my first blog and participated in Jay Cross’s first unworkshop.

What difference has it made in your professional practice?

I’ve worked in the training/learning/performance-improvement arena for thirty years. Early on, professional associations like ISPI helped expand my understanding of what was possible and what was effective. Taking part in local meetings and national conferences acquainted me with a wide range of people with whom I shared interests — different clusters, different interests.

My early experience with mainframe CBT — the 1980s version of distance learning — helped me shed the “sage on the stage” approach to training. Listserv participation highlighted the value of open, casual exchange with strangers who (by virtue of their participating in the same medium) likely had skills, experience, or challenges like mine.

Blogging for me serves several functions.

• It acts as a personal journal. Thanks in no small part to Harold Jarche’s example, I decided to muse publicly about things that interest me and that fall for the most part under the training / learning / performance umbrella.
• My blog helps me retain what I’m learning — it’s a do-it-yourself database from which I can easily retrieve, or to which I can direct someone who’s not yet at the social-bookmark stage. “Just go to my blog and search for Hans Rosling.” (If I had a latte for every time I said that, I couldn’t fall asleep till Thursday.)
• Third, active reflection means I’m also actively looking for information. My feedreader gathers sources that have worked for me; the fact that someone has a blog is a standing invitation for me to join the conversation if it appeals to me.

Although I’m an independent consultant, in the average week I have more professional contact — and contact more attuned to my interests — than I might have had in any six months without these tools. Add to the mix a freer flow of information through social bookmarks, tags, blogs, along with tools that make it easier for someone to create, share, and modify content, and you’ve got a powerful toolbox.

No one social application is essential — Flickr, del.icio.us, or Blogger will disappear, as Netscape, Lotus 1-2-3, and WordStar did before them. But the capabilities are such that learning professionals who ignore them are likely to handicap themselves.

As Roger Schank said, it took the training profession 30 years to get the overhead projector out of the bowling alley.

I’ll turn back to Alan Levine for a powerful example of social software at work:

It was D’Arcy at the UBC Social Software Salon who described it something like being removing or downplaying the “software” portion of online social interaction. Whatever your way of describing what “social software” is how, submitted below is a nice example of the informal way the web, blogs, maybe even RSS play a role in collectively building something in a way not previously possible.

(See Alan’s full post on social software in action.)

Eastern Boundary photo by Vidiot.
Bowling scoreboard photo by Brian Wallace.

Cathy Moore has an excellent post on action mapping. This is a technique for effectively designing training by figuring out:

• The business goal (Where do you want to go?)
• The necessary skill (What do people need to do?)
• The relevant activities (How can they practice those skills?)
• And the information people must have (What do they really need to know?)

It’s the specificity that gets you to effective training. I think of this as working backwards from the results you want. I recall a salesperson saying to me, at the start of a session, “I hope this is a good one — it’s costing me $45,000.”

He thought of each working day in terms of his quota, and time away from customers had to be recouped somehow. He wasn’t opposed to training — he just didn’t want it to waste his time. If it was product training, he didn’t want marketing department blather about world-class excellence going forward; he wanted to know what kinds of customers would benefit from which particular features, and how. He wanted to know where the product was weak or unsuitable, so he didn’t try selling the wrong thing.

I’ve talked about the key question that gets you from old-fashioned, content based training to on-the-job performance. Cathy’s showing one way to make that movement clear for a client. Not all of them will listen, but those who do are the ones who understand that the parts of an organization need to work in an organized fashion.

Hype-mobile photo by…me.