Dave's Whiteboard

ASTD’s T&D for January includes E-Learning: What’s Old is New Again, by Allison Rossett and James Marshall.  They wondered what e-learning looks like in the real world and surveyed nearly a thousand practitioners.

In her book on training needs analysis, Rossett talks about actuals and optimals–finding out how things really are, and determining what they could be.  She and Marshall take a similar approach here.  They summarize responses about how things are, e-learning-wise.  And they speculate about how things could be.

I think the article’s worth reading in full, especially for people who don’t work in corporate or organizational settings (two-thirds of the respondents do).  I agree that for many people, the workplace is changing, as is the definition of work.  At the same time, most of my own clients have been and are large organizations with multiple locations, often with a significant effort to provide structured learning (a term I prefer to “formal”).

I was especially struck (not to say “depressed”) by the last response in the first of several charts in the article:

Our structured training uses realistic situations, encourages choice, supports learning from that choice — less than “some of the time?”

Sadly, I think that’s accurate, and a true indictment for the organizations in which this happens.  Formal training departments may be complicit, but so too are organizational leaders.  Often, in the aeries just below C-level executives, there’s a touching faith in magic beans–nice, clear solutions to nagging problems that don’t look like they’re the organization’s real business.

My driver’s ed instructor told my class:

You never have the right of way.
You can only yield the right of way.

Recalling this precept got me thinking about driver education / driver training, and that got me thinking about how people have very different readings for “training,” “education,” and “learning.”

Learning to drive is a good example of a complex skill (the kind van Merrienboër and Kirschner grappled with in Ten Steps to Complex Learning).  We tend to think we know what the outcome of the education or training will be: a good driver.

But what’s that?

On the formal side, it’s really about passing requirements.  If you’re an adult who moves to Maryland, for instance,  you have to:

• Pass a vision test
• Have had an out-of-state license within the past year (no suspensions)

And if your out-of-state license expired a year ago, you have to take “the knowledge and skills tests,” which I take to mean a road test and what was once known as a written test.

I’ve been driving for more than 40 years and have had licenses in four states, but I don’t recall taking more than one road test.  Not that I’m eager to do so, but you do get the impression that if you pass it once, still drive, and haven’t lost your license, you’re doing okay.

Some of what vM&K would call constituent skills for driving are recurrent ones–how to start the car, how to stop, how to steer, how to recognize signals and respond to them.  But there are many non-recurrent skills (things we do differently in each situation).  The other day I was exiting a strip-mall parking lot, wanting to turn right onto the highway.  An oncoming car on that highway had its right turn signal on.

Did that mean he’d be turning into the lot I was exiting?  How could I tell?  How could I help a novice driver figure that out?

My old instructor’s advice about right of way was a kind schema or mental model, like the two-second rule–one way to help new learners acquire cognitive strategies.

In writing about this, I’m seeing more clearly that there’s also an overlap of stakeholders: the general public (represented by the state) wants the roads to be safe; new drivers want to be able to drive; parents want their children to drive safely.

They might not even agree on the outcome.  Is it “status as skilled driver” or simply “holder of a driver’s license?” Is “skilled” the same as “safe?”

(I can answer that one: no.  Just take a drive through heavy traffic with someone who prides himself on what a skillful driver he is.)

Maryland’s Motor Vehicle Adminstration publishes a skills log and practice guide “to help the new drives gain valuable experience in operating a motor vehicle in a variety of conditions and highway environments.”  Maryland now requires 60 hours of supervised driving prior to taking the tests, with 10 of those hours at night.  The parent, guardian, or mentor of the new driver must sign a statement attesting to this, in addition to the 6 hours of behind-the-wheel instruction in the mandatory driver education course.

I like the guide (other than the mid-60s bureaucratic tone of the writing).  A “planning guide” (on the right; click for a larger version) summarizes skills; individual sections amplify them with descriptions, examples, and checklists.

Because of the state’s interest in having competent drivers, it makes sense for the state to have created this.  Is 60 hours the right amount?  Are these skills the right skills?  Will parents or guardians follow the guide, or simply certify that they had?

I can’t say–and, frankly, neither can you.  This is a complex skill; there’s no one right answer.  I think you can make a case that most of the skills in the guide are basic ones for a competent driver.  At the same time, no test is going to guarantee that a new driver, or even an experienced one, will never have an accident.  (I’d settle at times for “will not talk on the phone while driving.”)

I’m not a fan of “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”  The basic idea works; sometimes good enough is just right.  So why the skepticism?  Like that tiresome definition of insanity (which some people repeat as if casting a spell), the perfect/good nostrum can substitute sloganeering for thought.

Sometimes the humdrum and the mediocre are the enemy of the good.

Which leads somehow to two seemingly unrelated conversations: my wife asking if you can save an Excel chart as a JPG, and a colleague and I exchanging tweets about tutorials and about “fun” in training.  “Seemingly” because the connection between the two is: accomplishment.

Excel chart as JIT graphic

My wife’s request had a clear focus: one of her coworkers, with basic Excel skills, wanted to use a chart as an image on a web page.  So I read into that “don’t get too complicated.”  I fiddled around with menus and right-clicks, but didn’t see anything obvious.

Googling “save excel chart as JPG” got lots of hits.  I learned there’s File / Save as Web Page.  That saves your spreadsheet as whatever.xls.  It also creates a folder, whatever_files, in which you’ll find the chart as image001.gif.  No, not a JPG, but good enough for the outcome.

“Fun” — the tutorial

In the Middle Ages, when I first learned PowerPoint, Microsoft had a clever tutorial–Christopher Columbus’s pitch for funding.  Whatever  umbrage you or Ed Tufte might take with PPT, I recall the tutorial clearly showing how to achieve certain effects: bullets, images, titles, and so forth. So I stuck with the tutorial, and quickly learned how to do things I wanted to do.

Which to me is a lot more important than “fun” stuck onto training like a clown nose onto a marble bust.

Or, say, an Indian war bonnet stuck onto the head of “the greatest man ever to come out of Plymouth Corner, Vermont” (as Clarence Darrow said of Calvin Coolidge).

There’s nothing (in theory) wrong with  clown noses, but context does matter.

More on “fun” in another post.  Let’s stick with what makes a good tutorial.

CTQ: a point of view

In Six Sigma parlance, critical-to-quality elements (CTQs) are things important to a process so you can produce what’s important to the customer.  If you want high customer satisfaction with your service contract, a one CTQ might be “scheduling that suits the customer.”  Meaning your time window should not be the size of a barn door.

One CTQ that I see for a tutorial is: can people get stuff done quickly?  Or is the tutorial so full of overview and first-of-all and before-you-begin that it feels like one of those half-day mandatory snoozefests for the corporate initiative fo the month?

My wife’s coworker already had some context: she knew Excel basics, and she knew about JPGs.  All that was necessary for her to do what she wanted boiled down to:

• Here’s how to turn an Excel chart into a GIF.
• Here’s how to find the GIF.
• You can use a GIF like you’d use a JPG.

When I first encountered PowerPoint, I didn’t have that context.  I hadn’t used presentation software before.  A rich tutorial made sense, and the design of the tutorial kept newcomer me engaged…

Until I hit the point where I felt I knew enough.  Then, I dropped out: I stopped the tutorial and got on with what I wanted to do: build a presentation.

Yes, this goes against a prescriptionist streak that you find in many trainers and instructional designers (including me).  We’re dying to tell you more, to share our hard-won–or at least much-valued–experience.  We mean well, but we can get a bit… smothery.

It’s important for both the designer and the learner to say, “That’s okay.”  I think drop-out-to-do may well be a key characteristic of successful demos or tutorials.  They show that someone feels she’s learned enough to try things on her own.

And trying things on your own is strength training for your neurons.  When things go well, it’s endorphin time.  When they don’t, you’ll put up with a certain amount of frustration and expend a certain amount of effort if you can still accomplish something that matters.

Thus the argument for well-built tutorials (or other detailed support): a reliable resource.  Unlike the typical software “knowledge base” that’s much more base than knowledge.

Photo of Calvin Coolidge from Wikimedia Commons.

Talking about live backchannels recently led to talking about feedback, which is good (in my view).  It’s feedback that offers the chance not to change, which was the first word trying to get in as I wrote this, but to decide. As in, decide whether to change or to keep on doing what you’re doing.

The difference?  Well, here are the basic steps of a process:

You can take the point-of-view elevator down (say, to the process for harvesting barley) or up (operating the Talisker distillery).  Processes go inside larger ones, link to others; an output here becomes an input there.

But you’re not getting the full picture.  You don’t know how you’re doing without feedback.  Thus items 7 and 9 on this diagram:

Item 9 on the diagram is feedback about the process (here’s how things are going).  You can see item 7 as both short-term and long-term feedback to the performer.  That’s the answer to “how’m I doing?”  (Sure, there’s crossover between the two, especially if it’s a single performer, but I was going for simplicity here.)

I talked recently with Dick Carlson about the backchannel.  He’s far more technically skilled than I am; he sometimes uses custom backchannel software in a session.  Each participate creates an anonymous ID (like, say, a favorite comic book character or root vegetable).  He displays the backchannel during the session, which means everybody gets to see when Granola&Grits says, “been there, declined the tshirt.”  Or when ParsnipAmazon says, “YES! ima usin this TODAY!”

Potential for an interesting bit of DIY research: do some sessions with the Veggie ID, others with name-based ID, then see if there’s discernable differences between the quality or quantity of feedback.  Okay, now, back to the post…

Not to say a backchannel is a requirement.  I have reservations, especially if most participants don’t have access to it–e.g., 60% lack devices to get to it. Shooting an anonymous remark into the stream is easier and potentially less intimidating than standing out by speaking up.

I’ve already said I’d be very distracted viewing a backchannel if I were presenting on my own.  Though on that topic, Aaron Silvers just today told me he found great value in reviewing a backchannel following a session he’d given.  During the session, he didn’t think he was doing that well, but what he saw in the stream afterward helped him see differently.

All of which is to say that software like Twitter is one way, not the way, to collect and retrieve feedback.  Which reminds me that collecting (storage) and retrieval (application) aren’t a bad way to think about the fundamentals of learning.

That’s my own “Looking for trouble?” chart.
My process diagram adapted from these CC-licensed images:
Ripening barley by net_efekt / Christian Guthier;
stills at the Lagavulin distillery by Freddie H / Frederique Harmsze;
glass of whisky by smiling_da_vince / Eelco.

At GE Information Services, our Software Development and Consulting people were technical consultants, working with the client’s IT staff before and after a sale.  When we hired new SDC people, some hadn’t spent much time with clients; they’d dwell  on networking, data communications, relational databases, and so on.  And on.

So: Technical Presentations for a Non-Tech Audience. I never liked the title, but the SDC people did, which was part of the point: does the audience like it?   I needed a topic for which I was the technical expert and they were not.  That ruled out electronic data interchange, the OSI model, and systems architecture.

But not Elizabethan drama.  That’s how I started.

Where you are: How would you feel about knocking off early today to see a 400-year old play?

• Maybe you like Shakespeare.  I can tell you that on a 10-point scale, where 1 meant “I’d prefer dental work,” the first SDC group came in at 2.5.

Where we’re going: I promised to explain why people in Shakespeare’s time would choose to see a play, when the other entertainments included bear-baiting and bawdy houses.

What you know: I asked what the SDC folks knew about the battle of the Alamo.

• From the “pretest,” I knew there weren’t many Shakespeare fans.  This apparently unrelated question (Shakespeare?  Alamo?) nudged the attention knob higher.
• What did they know?  Not many “factual” facts–date, numbers, causes.  Something about Texans, Mexicans, the 1800s,  overwhelming odds.  And maybe Davy Crockett.  Or John Wayne.

What you may not know: I spent about 5 minutes getting here, and took three more to make the connection:

• Most Americans know few historical facts about the battle of the Alamo (like the date), but we know emotional facts.
• Since 1836, people have made songs, stories, books, plays, and movies, each connecting the events of the Alamo to its audience, playing off those emotional facts.  (This is where John Wayne comes in, along with Fess Parker, Brian Keith, and Billy Bob Thornton.)
• The battle of Agincourt — the heart of Shakespeare’s play Henry V – was roughly as far removed from his audience as the Alamo is from us.
• The main difference?  At Agincourt, the Texans won.

This probably wouldn’t work for a multinational audience–those emotional facts about the Alamo are common in the U.S. but not in, say, Norway or New Zealand.  Which means it’s not the specifics of my story here, but what my audience already knew, and what I could use from that knowledge to to explain something new to them.

I went into details that fit the categories, to reinforce the connection.  Details like:

• Factual facts about Agincourt (just a few, paving the way for what would follow), including  the 5,000 archers with longbows who were five-sixths of Henry’s army.
• Emotional facts: everybody in Shakespeare’s audience “knew” Henry V had been a great king; everybody “knew” his army was vastly outnumbered; everybody “knew” the French were snobs.
• Connections: examples of how Shakespeare started from these facts, like having Henry disguise himself as an ordinary soldier (“Henry LeRoy”) to check morale.
• Features and benefits: everyone “knew” that Henry won not only the battle, but the daughter of the king of France.  Shakespeare plays off that by having Henry try to woo her, even though he can’t speak French and she “cannot speak your England.”

And of course, I gave a demo, with a little help from Kenneth Branagh.  (Right at the opening, there’s great exposition by Shakespeare, as the  earl of Westmoreland wishes for enough men to get the odds down to 2 to 1.)

Salespeople know the difference between features and benefits: a feature is a thing, like satellite radio in a new car.  A benefit is a value for the client, like tailored entertainment.  If the audience sees no value, a technical presentation isn’t much of a present.