Dave’s Whiteboard

I’m not too big on certificates of completion.  I do still have my high-school diploma, but mostly because it was engraved on metal and mounted to a 5 x 7 slab of wood.  (Try rolling that into a cylinder.)  I have four or five other paper endorsements, none of them hanging on a wall.  And I may still have the bizarre, serving-tray-size plaque that ISPI issued for my Certified Performance Technologist status — though since I can’t imagine where I’ve hidden it, you can assume it’ll never require a new hole in my office wall.

Some people do value certificates.  I got a reminder of that in Marguerite Inscoe’s post about workplace motivation at Five Star Musings.  I think there’s a distinction between motivation (meaning, an internal state) and incentive (an outside system).  The two states are closely related, so if an employee finds certificates motivating, then the organization’s system of incentives should at the least offer them.

I’ve neglected the potential value of certificates and other recognition in the past.  Maybe I’d seen one too many “ego walls” covered with testimonials for every activity known to corporate printing.  I’ve also never quite understood the CEU (continuing education unit), essentially a measure of time spent, except as something easy to count, and therefore counted.

It’s not really my job to decide where other people find their motivation; I strongly dislike others deciding that for me.

I don’t know much about open accreditation, but I think it’s going to creep up from the back burner (or from off the counter) for a lot of people in the training/learning field.  Even if you’re dealing only with individuals (e.g., at FrenchPod or its friends and relations), many of those individuals may want some recognition of a level of accomplishment, and others will want to know what the accomplishments represent.

Tangentially, I’ve been researching mini keyboards — separate keyboards with roughly the configuration of a laptop’s, without the useless numeric keypad and other stuff taking an extra 6 inches on the right.  The “open accreditation” in the form of user reviews is pretty thin.  As in other areas of life, I can read the reviews in detail and distinguish the rah-rah reviewer from the this-is-lame reviewer, and occasionally find the thoughtful one that seems to me to offer true value.

Too much of a leap from open accreditation?  I can’t say.  Just an indicator of how we’re moving into new territory, like the 19th-century explorers trying to comprehend the labyrinth of northern Canada.  A few of us, myself included, sometimes have to recognize that our previous models don’t necessarily apply.

With a hundred seamen he sailed away
To the frozen ocean in the month of May
To seek a passage around the pole
Where these poor sailors do sometimes go

Through cruel hardships they vainly strove
Their ships on mountains of ice were drove
Only the Eskimo in his skin canoe
Was the only one that ever came through

– from Lord Franklin (or Lady Franklin’s Lament)

“Certificate of Computation” by Mangee.

UPDATE on 10-21) This post was going to be part of the October edition of the Working / Learning blog carnival, hosted at the Xyleme Learning Blog.  Leean and I have decided to move the date for that edition of the carnival to October 27th.
(What’s a blog carnival?  Details here. Don’t be shy.)

Harold Jarche’s post, Beyond Training, got me thinking about the arc (or the scattergram) of my own career.  Part of Harold’s point is that social media, with the connections and the immediacy that they enable, may herald the end, or at least the decline, of the factory approach to organizational training… and maybe even learning.

He might be right, though I think that large organizations will take a long time shifting.  Rosabeth Moss Kanter notwithstanding, most elephants don’t learn to dance — they get replaced by more terpsichorean others.

Or maybe we just have a lot of crystal balls, each of them providing one glimpse of a possible future.

When I started as a “writer/instructor” with Amtrak, training ruled the corporate instructional world.  Except where psychomotor skills dominated (the actual operation of an airplane, say), the primary model involved:

• A body of knowledge, out there somewhere
• People who had to “acquire” that knowledge
• Various strategies and tactics for making that acquisition happen

Not all the strategies, and certainly not all the tactics, were optimal.  Still, people could and did learn — meaning, they started off unable to do a job, and ended up able to do it.

Gradually, though, the emphasis in how to develop training shifted — especially as some practitioners noticed that you don’t actually have to “train” (as in, “get people to memorize”) every part of every task.  This is where real instructional design started to matter.  If you alter your focus and work backwards from the performance you’re looking for, you can find strategies and tactics that don’t depend on repeating high school throughout a person’s working life.

In other words, it’s not do X and Y and Z in order to evaluate bank loan applications.  Instead, it’s here are the criteria for an acceptable loan, and here are ways to go about applying those criteria.  Which in turn meant “use this job aid” (or this online wizard) instead of “memorize these 37 factors.”

Joe Harless, among many others, saw that there are only two places to store knowledge (inside your head, or outside of it).  Storing inside (whether you call it learning or memorizing) is almost always costlier.

That stage still had a heavy emphasis on “body of knowledge;” it just connected the knowledge more clearly to the desired results.

Around the same time, but in a wider orbit, people like Geary Rummler, Dale Brethower, and Robert Mager (among many, many others) began taking a systems approach.  How a person (or a group) performs on the job depends on many things besides skill and knowledge.  A lot of this stuff has nothing to do with training, and a good part of it has nothing to do with learning, so far as the individual or group is concerned.

Performance improvement can be a much harder sell in an organization.  It’s not as tidy and easily understood as “11,000 student-days in the last six months” or “an average score of 85% on the ‘Basics of EDI’ online course.” The potential payoff is huge, especially when the group itself begins analyzing and problem-solving systematically.

There’s a parallel with things like Six Sigma, which in one company can re-energize while in another company becomes just the official religion (till the next one shows up).

Now we’re in the early stages of a new way of affecting performance on the job.  I’m still skeptical that most people can are willing, let alone ready, to take charge of their own learning.  I’m more skeptical that they can do that in concert with their peers in large or complex organizations.

I do agree with Harold that organizations may be moving from a performance-improvement approach to a “connecting and facilitating one.”  (Though I have to say that an awful lot of organizations I’ve seen would be doing very well to start thinking about performance improvement instead of butts-in-seats and LMS-hours-per-employee.)

Harold, Michele Martin, and Tony Karrer have put together Work Literacy’s Web 2.0 for Learning Professionals.  I think of it as usefully chaotic; it’s a site where people interested in various implications of 2.0 can find out more, discover people with experience or people with similar interests.

I don’t know whether that approach could easily transfer to areas of performance with high risk — where compliance with standards or outside regulations is mandatory, for example, or where the consequence of error is significant. Nor where stuff is just plain complex.

I’m not saying it can’t.  I’m saying I don’t know, and I’m not sure anyone else does.  We’re in a period of learning, which means interacting with the outside world and experiencing some stress.  The feedback from that interaction causes physical change in a person’s brain, and those physical changes lead to… learning.

There isn’t an either-or answer, and it’s foolish to seek one.  Straightforward, near-transfer, procedural stuff — how to operate the home-makeover software to help the home store customer plan a remodeling, say — fits very well into what looks like “training” to the average person.

Call it “informed learning support.”  Some basic terminology here, some concepts there, a suggested series of exercises there.  Connect with others at roughly your level?  Sure.  Involve more experienced people (who’ve perhaps been coached to encourage you to experiment and even fall short before they give you more explicit help)?  You got it.

Most people don’t want to stumble around in the basics.  If they don’t know anything, they’d like to get quickly to where they do know something, so they can try to do something.  The factory learning model doesn’t fit every situation, but neither does everyone want to build his own auto engine, let alone smelt the steel to make it with.

Photo of balls in crystal by David Reese.

In a post on her Making Change blog, Cathy Moore offers valuable advice on concise and lively writing.  Part of her advice: don’t fret about the needlessly specific reading level; focus on reading ease.

Despite the title, I’m pretty sure Cathy doesn’t want everyone to sound just like Ernest Hemingway, whose prose sometimes reads as though he hacked it out of scrap wood with a steak knife and a tire iron.  Pappa’s stubbornly plain style differs greatly from Samuel Johnson’s, but Hemingway would agree with this sentiment:

What is written without effort
is generally read without pleasure.

Much of that effort comes during a rewrite, when you go over your great idea and try to get out of your own way.  For example, I love analogies that surprise people — but when they’re too surprising, they don’t highlight and clarify, which is what you hire analogies to do.  If Sarah Vowell’s going to compare the Rolling Stones to a pastry (that covers the surprising part), she has to follow through without straining.

(Maybe they’re like bagels — sometimes the leaden, grocery-store brand with almost no appeal, just the shape and color.  And sometimes they’re tough on the outside, satisfying on the inside, taking us back to what feels like emotional hot coffee and crackling autumn mornings…)

Here’s one approach to going editing your own work when you’re writing to guide others (training material, guides for independent learning, job aids).  More than three steps, it’s three passes.  Editing is complex; the idea is to have a focus for each pass.

First edit: completeness

Are you saying the right things?  Is anything missing (a key step, a prerequisite, a clarification of an outcome)?  Are you technically correct?  Depending on the situation, you might need to have an expert make this pass.  (If you do, make clear that at this stage you don’t necessarily want to rearrange things; you just want to make sure that you’re complete and correct.  Concise isn’t bad, either.

Second edit: sequence

The goal of the first pass is to say the right things.  The goal of the second pass is to say them in the right order.  People like Cathy Moore understand that you don’t need anywhere near the amount of preliminary folderol that trainers and educators tend to lard things up with.  Even Robert Mager will forgive you if you don’t state fifteen behavioral objectives at the start — and most learners will bless you.

If you’re writing a guide, a job aid, something meant to take people through a process, then sequence is critical.  You don’t want to mix things up and pretend that’s “creativity.”  For complex processes, it helps to give the big picture, and then to have independent, standalone sections that model variations or elaborations of the process.

Take a look at some of the examples at the maxdesign website (the Floatutorial, about controlling images and text on a web page via CSS, is especially good).

Third edit: language

As you go through the first two edit passes, you’ll fix some of your language.  You can’t help it.  Control yourself, though; catch any obvious flaws, but discipline yourself.  You want to make a third pass through the work to look specifically at how you say what you say.

In the third pass, you deploy all your sharp tools: parallel construction, active verbs, shorter sentences (when it comes to words, twenty is plenty).  You’re completing the work, the way you complete your paint job by cleaning drips, touching up places you missed, and removing the masking tape.

Editing and the world of right now

Many pressures work against editing and revision.  Who edits blog posts?  Who rewrites email?  I think there’s an analogy with Kirkpatrick’s levels of evaluation.  In the real world, you don’t do level three or level four evaluations for every program.  You do them, or you should, when your effort is supposed to make a significant difference.

So, no, you don’t necessarily need to let your tweets rest so you can rewrite them before sending them out to enrich the world.  Some bloggers pride themselves on the speed of production (maybe there’s an award I don’t know about); I find I usually do better when I take my time posting (and I sometimes do worse if I don’t take my time commenting).

“The tartan is all of the one stuff,” goes the proverb, and so is the process of writing for learners.  But there are several sub-processes, and all of them matter:

Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.

– Thomas Edison

Mick Jagger photo by SpreePiX - Berlin / René.
Bagel-shop photo by threecee / tracy collins.

You don’t hear much about privatizing Social Security lately.  This morning’s Washington Post notes that retirement savings for Americans have lost $2 trillion in the past 15 months (roughly a 20% decline).

Yes, it’s likely the market will stagger back eventually, but if you’re looking at the desire or the need to live on your investments within the next 10 years, the route has just gotten a lot steeper.  More so, since the AARP reports that 20% of baby boomers stopped making any contribution to their retirement plans in the past year.

They needed the money.

A report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (PDF) says that the proportion of workers age 55 and older will grow by nearly 47% by 2016 (five times the rate for the work force as a whole).  In fact, by 2016 this group will make up 22.7% of the work force (versus 16.8% in 2006 and 11.9% in 1996).

The same report predicts that by 2016, nearly 30% of all people aged 65-74 will still be working, and 10.5% of those 75 and older.

I see a lot of opportunity and a lot of challenge in this (and not just because of my own age bracket).  On the one hand:

• More people can work productively thanks to organizations thinking beyond the 8:30 - 5:30, here’s you cubicle model.
• Technology shortens distance, reduces (some) drudgery, and provides a scaffold from which a seasoned person can more effectively wield his experience and harness his personalized networks.
• Many people  in the baby-boomer cohort don’t see their life past 65 as one of puttering, early-bird dinners, and naps.  They’re energized by being involved.

More unsettling, though: many people now 55 or older have long careers in endangered sectors like manufacturing, with work experience that may be hard to transfer elsewhere.  Given our pastiche of a health care system in the U.S., many feel unable to switch jobs, let alone industries, for fear of losing insurance coverage.

Even those in white-collar work are often basic users of technology: they send email, they go to web sites, they transact business online. But the further past your 50th birthday you are (not you, reading this — you’re an exception), the less likely you are to use RSS, let alone participate in career-related virtual networks.

Finally, although we’d like to ignore it, many of us will not have the physical ability to work past age 70.

Eight years from now, not everyone’s going to be self-employed.  Not everyone’s going to be a consultant.  Not everyone will be as original an entrepreneur as the person in North Carolina who erected the sign in the photo.

From here for the next ten years, and maybe longer, the percentage of the workforce over age 60 will be larger than at any time in our history — and will increase each year.

As for the post-boomers: at the end of that time period, you’ll be 10 years closer to 60 yourselves.

It’s the end of our vacation. The sun, low to the west, slants across the deck. From the window on my left, I can see lazy little breakers and a few tireless sanderlings. For some reason, the song in my head is Jimmy Mó Mhíle Stór (”Jimmy, my thousand treasures”).

I was able to find it in case you’d like to hear. The images aren’t North Carolina, but some of the water is the Atlantic.

The singers are Cookie, Heather, and Raylene Rankin, sisters from Mabou, on Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island (also, my fourth cousins once removed). You may recognize the band as well; the song appears on their album Tears of Stone.

The verses are in Irish (Gaeilge).

Bliain an taca seo Jimmy d’imigh uaim rún mo chléibh
Ní thiocfaidh sé abhaile go dtabharfaidh sé cúrsa an tsaoil;
Nuair a chífead é rithfead le fuinneamh ró-ard ina chomhair
‘S clúdód le mil é, sé Jimmy mó mhíle stór

Bíonn m’athair is mo mháthair ag bearradh’s ag bruíon liom féin
Táim giobaithe piocaithe ciapaithe cráite dem shaol;
Thugas taitneamh don duine úd dob fhinne ’s dob áille snó
Is chuaigh sé ar bhord loinge, sé Jimmy mó mhíle stór

These twelve months and better my darling has left the shore
He ne’er will come back till he travels the globe all over
And when he returns with laurels I’ll crown him all over
He’s the fondest of lovers, sweet Jimmy mó mhíle stór

Raghadsa chun coille agus caithfead an chuid eile
San áit ná beidh éinne, ag éisteacht le ceol na n-éan
Ag bun an chrainn chaorthainn mar a bhfásann ann féar go leor
Ag tabhairt taitnimh don duine úd, sé Jimmy mó mhíle stór

He’s the fondest of lovers, sweet Jimmy mó mhíle stór