Dave's Whiteboard

Apt, somehow, that I learned about the demise of Training magazine via Twitter.

Though “via Twitter” is misleading.  I learned about the closing from Jane Bozarth. Twitter’s just how the news arrived; it’s the way Jane and I usually connect.  You wouldn’t say “I learned about it by phone” unless there were some unusual significance to the phone itself–as in, that’s how you found out you’d been laid off.

For a long time, especially when Ron Zemke and Jack Gordon were among its editors, Training was by far my favorite professional magazine.  Training and Development had too much ASTD superstructure showing.  While Performance Improvement often had solid content, the gems were often larded with academic or HPT jargon and boxed in a bargain-basement layout.

It’s been a long time since I subscribed to any of these.  They all ended up on the wrong side of my cost-benefit divide for me.  As for Training in particular, I wasn’t aware it was still being published.   Hence, gerontoprise, a word suggested by Caroline Kliemt in an email conversation: surprise at learning that something has just died–because you didn’t know it was still around.

(I could have used this word in 1989, when I learned of the death at age 101 of Sir Thomas Sopwith, as in the World War I fighter plane, the Sopwith Camel.)

What I valued in professional magazine pieces was most often some combination of depth (as in detail), relevance (fit what what I was working on or interested in), and clarity.  I also appreciated combining “here’s what’s new” with a refusal to drool over bandwagons.  Training could do that well, 10 or 15 years ago.

What I disliked?  The pauses.  Once you read an issue, you had nothing more till the next one.  And, for the most part, you as an individual had no voice in what topics might occur; you were relying on the editors.  In the case of Training, I did note an apparent abandonment of seriousness as the publication went through new management, lost experienced staffers, and seemed less and less interested in connecting practice to theory.

Not that I need five pounds of theory per day.  Connecting practice to theory (having a basis for doing what you do, other than “feels good for now”) can help you avoid hopping onto too many of those bandwagons.  (As Claude Lineberry once said, “Computer-based training isn’t the answer.  Computer-based training is a question.”)

I do think Training was a true resource, especially if you were new to the “learning profession” and doubly so if you were pretty much the only one in your organization doing what you were doing.  Like the defunct TRDEV-L listserv, Training was a step toward a virtual community.

You’ve got many more options for community now, which helps explains why the magazine folded.  One corollary, though, is that  you’ve got to wire up those connections yourself.  You need to think about where you can nourish and expand your professional interests and passions: blogs, Facebook, Twitter, news feeds, virtual conferences, face-to-face conferences, whatever.

But that’s true for any valued network in your life, I think.

CC-licensed images:
Going-out-of-business photo by Unhindered By Talent / Nic McPhee.
Saskatchewan telephone image by Colros / Colin Rose.

Harold Jarche posted a great set of slides on complexity, the web, and business.  I’ll get out of the way and let him explain:

I have three real blogs, by which I mean ones I actually post things on.  I have two others I received by registering at WordPress.com and Blogger.  I almost never sign on to Blogger (a choice, not a critique), and mainly use WordPress.com when I show someone how to start a blog.

I don’t do that often; I’m a poor proselytizer.  But I’m not bad at explaining.

There are two main routes to having your own blog.  The simpler one, for most people, is a blog hosted on sites like WordPress.com or Blogger.  You don’t have to consider domain name, hosting services, or any of that stuff.

You do have to figure out how a blog works, which like many things can seem quite complicated from the outside.  I’m a WordPress fan, but its distinction between Post and Page is not intuitive, and the explanation in the WordPress Codex isn’t much help to a newcomer.

( *** Tech term alert: if you don’t care about WordPress, feel free to skip the next paragraph. ***)

A WP novice doesn’t immediately grasp whether, when, or how to use categories.  She doesn’t necessarily see the distinctions between publish, preview, and save draft.  It’s not obvious how to write a post and set it to appear automatically at a later time. And that’s just the writing-a-post stuff, not the admin controls, the use of plug-ins, or the tradeoffs that come with switching your theme.

The second route to having a blog is to have your own domain (like my www.daveswhiteboard.com), to have that domain hosted (by a hosting service or, for those with lots of tech time, on your own), and to install blog software on your domain the way I’ve installed WordPress on mine.

None of that is all that hard, necessarily — but it’s comparable to learning to drive a standard transmission car when you only know how to drive an automatic.  There’s more stuff going on, more that you have to think about, concepts you need to incorporate, skills you need to build.  The effort can well be worthwhile (either for the stick shift or for the domain), but it’s not essential.  At least not in the way that food, shelter, clothing, and shortbread are.

My own impression of a blog, way back when, was “here’s my big thought of the day.”  After nearly four years, I know quite a few bloggers.  Most of them don’t see their blog that way.  Still, you can see the parallel with the (relatively) uninformed picture of Twitter as “here’s what I had for lunch.”

My first blog is a collection of stories by and about people from Cape Breton Island, where I was born.  Most of them aren’t by me.  My second blog began as a way to keep in touch with my parents, who’d been online for a few years but had trouble when it came to reading email, finding items they’d previously read, and opening attachments.

My point is not that you ought to blog for your family stories or to keep in touch with your parents.  Instead, it’s that if you’ve got something you want to share with one or more people at a distance, and you think you might have a number of things to share, then a blog’s one way you can do that.

A longtime colleague and friend has a serious-hobby interest–to preserve his privacy, I’ll say this interest is in Japanese ceramics, because it’s not.   He collects Japanese ceramics, he makes trips to examine them, he meets often with people also interested in ceramics.

He asked about making a web page to summarize lectures about Japanese ceramics, I suggested a blog to accomplish this–far less a technical leap for him than a full-blown website.  I walked him through WordPress.com’s setup.  He made practice posts (so he learned by doing simple versions of the real task).  I’ve spent five or six hours all told helping him maintain and troubleshoot his blog.

He does almost nothing the way I would.  The most recent post doesn’t appear on the main page.  He has white type on a dark background.  He has dozens of photos in a single post.  He has enormously long posts (no “click to read more” for him).  He doesn’t allow comments.

And yet…

He gets email from strangers who him for sharing in this way.  Guest lecturers collaborate with him because they’re so pleased to have their material circulated more widely, especially by someone attuned to nuance in the world of Japanese ceramics.  He’s chugged along for two years with a slow rise to about two posts a month.

I’ve learned a lot from helping him.  In particular, I’ve been reminded of the difference between an option, a preference, and a recommendation.  You could argue that his blog might be more “successful” if he changed some of his practice–but I believe he knows what he wants to say, how he wants to say it, and quite a bit about who might want to hear it said.

CC-licensed images:
Tow-away hours image by Brett L.
1940 Oldsmobile manual image by Hugo90.

Is all learning “social?”  In some ways, that’s a metaphysical question.  I’ve learned by reading and then applying what I read to some problem– like fiddling with the style sheet on my blog.

I suppose I’ve interacted with the person who wrote the book, and indirectly with the people who see the results of what I’ve done.  Or with myself, if I’m the only one who can tell the difference.

Parsing this can be fun, like pre-Vatican II discussions of Catholic practice.  “Brother Andrew–if it was Friday at the South Pole, and I had a ham sandwich, could I walk over to where it would be Saturday and eat the sandwich?  Would I have to wait before walking back to Friday?”

Most of the time, I think learning evidence itself through interaction with others (so, “social”).  More important, to me “learning” demands application.  Until you retrieve the facts, exercise the skill, attempt a new arrangement–do something–I don’t quite see how you can claim to have learned.

With that meandering out of the way, I’d like to highlight a highly useful series by Jane Hart: C4LPT’s Guide to Social Learning.  She discusses the shift from elearning to social learning, discusses social media, and gives examples of social media in learning.

Most helpful to me: Jane identified five types of learning.  Harold Jarche looked at those and created the chart you see on the right, showing the amount of  “directedness” for each category.

• IOL: intra-organizational learning
• GDL: group-directed learning
• PDL: personally-directed learning
• ASL: accidental and serendipitous learning
• FSL: formal structured learning

(So the list and the chart are a nice example of collaboration.  I thank Jane for clarifying this for me, and have edited this post accordingly.)

A highlight of Jane’s series is an extensive list of examples.  In a grid, she provides examples of different social media tools as they can be used for each of the types of learning in Harold’s chart.

There’s plenty more, including discussions for each of the five categories.  Take a look; see if there’s anything you can…well, learn.

“Talking to self” image adapted under a CC license from a photo by Leeni! / Kathleen.

I made a smoothie for breakfast (banana, blueberries, yogurt) and didn’t tell anyone on Twitter.

On the other hand, I started Tweetdeck (my default Twitter client) not long after finishing that smoothie.  One of the handy features of Tweetdeck is that you can create columns to suit your interest.  For example, I have a “favorites” column.  If I want to remember to follow up something in a tweet, I mark it as a favorite.  That way I know I can find it again in the favorites column.

All that as a preview to one item added to the Favorites column.  Fittingly, it was Kathy Sierra’s retweet of someone else (retweets are one way your connect to other people’s networks).  That someone was another person well worth following–Julie Dirksen, who in turn was linking to Lennart Nacke’s blog, The Acagamic.

On December 1st, Nacke began an “Advent calendar” of posts “with my favorite presentation slides about games, user experience, game design, emotion, affective and entertainment computing, etc.” Some examples of what he’s talking about:

• What’s in a game? (Using game design decisions to create engagement in applications)
• Designing a game changer (applying game concepts to…accounting?)
• Gaming it (what user experience designers can learn from game designers)

Julie Dirksen is no slouch, either, when it comes to sharing good examples–as in her November post, Start seeing games: 10 examples of games that overlap with life.  I’m a big believer in the inductive approach.  I think most people learn more easily when they start with specific examples and work toward general concepts.  A range of selections, like those provided by Nacke and Dirksen, can be booster rockets for more creative thinking.