Dave's Whiteboard

When I read about the Organize Series plugin for WordPress (a focus of Monday’s post), I thought, “This could do it.”

No I didn’t.  I don’t know about you, but I rarely think to myself in complete sentences.  Phrasing like this is how we capsulize a more complex experience.  What I believe was going on at the time was something like this: I had a situation I wanted to change (the way I used to manage a series of posts here on my blog no longer worked). And the Organize Series plugin at first glance looked like it could accomplish at least two things:

• Provide automatic navigation between posts in a series (so I wouldn’t have to hard-wire the links).
• Display a list of all the posts in a given series (for me to use as a summary or as a table of contents for the series).

If I’d thought about it longer, I might have articulated another goal: have some way to list all the different series I have.  But I’m not usually that strategic.  Still, what I came up with (provide navigation, display a list) acted as my critical-to-quality elements.  CTQs were widely used at GE when I worked there; I use that acronym partly tongue-in-cheek and partly to highlight informal criteria.

So, I put Organize Series to work, and within 10 minutes I had automatic next/previous navigation for posts in a series, along with an indication that they were part of a series:

(You can click the image to see the entire post.)

When I was still considering whether to use the plugin, I said to my wife, “Wouldn’t it be great to know how to write a plugin?”  On reflection, I realize this statement was another capsulization–a series of them, nested inside each other.  ”Know how to write a plugin” really means:

• “Know how to write a plugin” really means “write a plugin that works….”
• Which in turn means “write one that produces results…”
• Which means “write one that people use to accomplish things that matter to them.”

To me, this is an important distinction for workplace learning: You can learn on your own for your personal satisfaction, and if you’re satisfied, then that’s a sufficient result.  In the workplace, though, you’re part of a larger group (even if that group is you and one individual client), and so the result has to matter within that context.

What’s this got to do with my plugin tinkering?

Think of it as my own workplace learning.  At this point, I was still some distance from my (loosely articulated) end state.  I hadn’t moved much toward my other CTQ of displaying a list of all the posts in a series. In fact, I didn’t yet grasp all the options in the plugin, let alone know how to make them work in a way useful to me.

About 5% of the info from the plugin's page of options

But…In my first 15 minutes with the plugin, I’d achieved a result that I found valuable.  That left me more willing to experiment–which, put another way, says I was somewhat more willing to spend time trying to achieve the next valuable result.

To me, this is a core principle for any type of workplace learning: formal or informal, face-to-face or virtual.  I need to be able to accomplish something that looks to me like real work–produce something that I see has having on-the-job value.  And I need to do that sooner rather than later, which is why twenty minutes on introductions, half an hour on expectations for this workshop, and twenty minutes on learning objectives will invariably drive me to teeth-clenching frustration. Or to eating more of those lowest-bid-hotel pastries.

One of the unexpected outcomes of achieving an initial on-the-job goal is that you end up better able to visualize other goals.  In a sense, learning leads to new problems (or opportunites) because you’re better at grasping the current situation and at visualizing different ones.

In the course of my experimenting with the Organize Series plugin, I did find at least one way to display a list of all the posts in a series.  I can make a box like this appear alongside the title for each post:

The posts in my most complex series

You can click that image if you’d like to see the first post in the series, though I’ve turned this “series post list box” feature off for now, until I learn how to control the way it displays.  Having managed to produce it, though, I’ve picked up several more goals for myself.  I was about to write “learning goals,” but I want to stress that they’re all tied to accomplishment.

• I want to learn how to use code that’s part of the plugin to, for example, display a list of posts like the last example where and when I want it.
• I want to find out how to modify the plugin’s template (the tool it uses to display the full text of all the posts in a series).
• I may even want to learn how to modify the PHP or CSS code to make things happen.

That last is quite a goal for someone who doesn’t really know how to program.  But my various experiments to date, and especially the things I see as successes, have taught me that I can learn to successfully modify small bits of PHP code and achieve relatively high-value results.

So I’m accomplishing what looks like real work to me.

Lena H. Sun of The Washington Post, who often reports on health-related topics, has an article in today’s paper about the use in medical training of “standardized patients” — healthy people portraying patients.  (Here’s how Johns Hopkins Medicine describes its standardized patient program.)

Developing the capabilities of doctors, nurses, and other practitioners is a clear example of complex learning.  You have a wide range of skills.  Some are primarily procedural: when you draw blood, do it like this; when you’re checking vital signs, do it like that. Follow this process for obtaining and recording data.

Most of what we think of as medical training, though, involves skill for situations where there’s no single correct approach to a given problem.  So the standardized patient is an individual who’s portraying a particular type of patient–in other words, someone who’s acting as a realistic learning task.

Many [of the standardized patients] are actors, but actors don’t always make the best patients, clinical directors said. Improv is not allowed. People trained to portray a particular type of patient must work from the same facts and deliver responses in the same way to the students examining them.

“They can’t overact,” said Kathy Schaivone, clinical instructor and director [of the Clinical Education and Evaluation Laboratory] at the University of Maryland at Baltimore. “If I can’t guarantee that all five will cry, the ones that I know that can [cry], I have to ask them not to.”

(Here’s an overview of the standardized patient curriculum at U-Maryland Baltimore.)

One challenge for the standardized patients is to provide a structured debriefing: “Did the student palpate the sinuses? Listen to the heart in all four places? Wash hands before and after touching the patient?”

In this setting, I see two interconnected sets of skills:

• Those needed by the medical practitioners to relate to patients, interact with them, and arrive at a reasonable diagnosis based on limited information.
• Those needed by the standardized patients in order to believably and consistently portray someone with a particular condition.

Behind both of these, of course, is an intensive effort to design, develop, and implement the training.  Beyond the somewhat obvious (what conditions are both useful to have portrayed and suited to the standardized patient approach?), there’s the multilevel skill required of the patients: how do I portray the condition?  What do I share readily?  What do I tend to withhold?  What am I incorrect about?

In addition, the patients need to debrief the students, both via checklists and via face-to-face feedback. Program directors like Schaivone, meanwhile, need to monitor the performances of both the patients and the students.

To illustrate the complexity of behavior, the online version of Sun’s article has a link to this May 2011 article on how doctors struggle to show compassion, by Manoj Jain, an infectious disease specialist and professor at Emory University.

‘Standardized medicine’ image adapted from the CC-licensed original by Ben Weston (Tek F).

I know, I know, “learning events” is pretty vague.  But I wanted a crisper title than “an idiosyncratic list of face-to-face professional-development opportunities for people in the training / learning / performance improvement field.”

I don’t get to many in-person learning events.  This year I did go to the Innovations in eLearning Symposium (which was 40 miles from my house), and two years ago I made a presentation at a CSTD event in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

The idea of presenting to your peers is a bracing stimulus, a strong incentive to reflect on what you do, what you’ve learned, and what you can share that’s useful to someone else.  Not that I always have to present, but I think sharing what you’ve learned with your colleagues is an opportunity you’d do well to embrace.

I find it hard to keep track of what’s happening where (and especially when) in terms of conferences and similar events that I might like to attend.  That’s why I’ve created a calendar of learning events.  It’s a spreadsheet on Google Docs that lists these things in chronological order.

Screen shot: events listed by start date (click to enlarge)

In addition to providing a link to the event’s site, the list includes  events that have already taken place; dates in the past appear in gray.  The idea is to retain them for a year.  I figure that will help me estimate when the event will take place next year, even if the organization’s plans aren’t yet available.

I did find a few similar lists, but none of them had a feature I really needed:  events sorted by the due date for proposals:

Screen shot: events by due date for submitting a proposal (click to enlarge)

I might ask myself why ISPI needs an eight-month lead time for proposals, but at least this way I know that’s their lead time.

I thought a list like this might be useful to others, which is why I’ve put it on Google Docs and why I’m sharing a bit.ly link ( http://bit.ly/k0YOvw ) instead of Google’s 136-character URL.

The document  actually has several  sheets that you can view (not including a couple of other sheets where I hide the machinery that makes the lists work):

• A welcome page with contents (links to the other sheets)
• The list of events sorted by start date
• The list of events sorted by due date for proposals
• The (unsorted) master list that the other lists work from

If other people find these lists useful, or if they suggest events to include, I’ll be delighted.  That’s part of the reason for the rambly “about this calendar” page: to say more than you’d want to read here about the kinds of event I think would fit and the kinds that wouldn’t.

Somewhere, yet another big organization is working on yet another big computer system.  Legions of stakeholders are fussing about what the system needs to have if they’re going to get their real work done.

Few of them, alas, are making the case for a robust, easy, and safe way to practice.  A shame, considering the universal desire to have people learn such systems.

Instead, people are mired in situations like a financial services project I worked on.  Its banking module, used by the people at a branch, enabled them to electronically open accounts for a customer, transfer funds, and handle loan applications.

But there was no way to practice those tasks.  If you wanted to get skilled at, say, processing an auto loan, you had to process an actual one–preferably for yourself, so you wouldn’t need someone else’s Social Security number.  You couldn’t complete the transaction.  Well, you could if you were actually getting a car loan.  Seemed like a mighty rigorous prerequisite.  And training people to do A, B, but not C — quick, hit cancel! — is disconcerting.

A practice system, like its first cousin, a test mode that truly works like the actual system, is a kind of performance-support forest that companies can’t see because all the stakeholders are focused on the system-spec trees.

When I managed online training for Amtrak’s reservation system, we inherited three imaginary trains that agents could access with a training ID. Granted, learners could reserve seats and sleeping compartments, but not much more.  And the practice provided was suboptimal.

Each imaginary train had a consist (a set of cars, with passenger accommodations), but there was no automatic cancellation of the fictional reservations.  In other words, the imaginary trains could sell out.

As for transferring skills, the trains didn’t follow any actual Amtrak route.  One went from London to Rome; Another, from London to Dublin–by way of Donegal.

More to the point, pretty much all you could do was reserve space.  You couldn’t calculate fares, in part because Amtrak didn’t have fares on the London-Donegal Express, but also because there was no connection between the imaginary trains and other parts of the system. Like fares.

During my time as head of online training , we decided to do better.  Leslie, who’d been a reservations agent, worked with John from the Train Operations group.  I’ll discuss specifics not because you need to know about Amtrak reservations, but to show the kinds of factors to consider when planning a sturdy practice system.

Realism: Leslie and John created training trains based on real ones: they cloned trains 3 and 4 (Chicago – Los Angeles) as 9003 and 9004 (no real-world trains had numbers in the 9000s).  Same cities, same accommodations, same schedule.

Coverage: They identified all the different types of Amtrak accommodations, then created training trains to include them all.  They took in geographic routes, so that while they didn’t duplicate the entire Amtrak system, they had trains in every part of the country.  This country.

Integration: the training trains got their city information, schedules, accommodations, and fares from the live system. When the fares changed on the real route, they changed on the training trains as well.  The training ID could access all the information-only parts of the system: fare quotes, current train status, and the like.

Resilience: you could make as many reservations as you liked, for whatever day you liked. At midnight, they’d all get purged, so as not to clog the system with imaginary trains filled with imaginary passengers.  And for entire new services, we could clone another real-world train and launch it in the training environment.

Security: we built in safeguards against error.  If you logged on with the training ID, you couldn’t reserve space or issue tickets on real-life trains.  Your real-system ID would not let you use or even display the training trains.  The burden of requiring  a training ID for practice was low, and the separate systems meant that even if you forgot which mode you were in, you couldn’t do anything harmful to a real reservation.

Continuing the security angle, you could make ticketing entries on the training trains.  That means you could pull up a training-train reservation and tell the system you were issuing tickets.  You couldn’t print the tickets, though, and the financial system ignored “sales” on the training trains.

What did Amtrak get out of this?

• Any Amtrak ticket clerk or reservation agent (more than 2,000 people at that time) could practice virtually any entry, or combination of entries, via the training trains.
• The new training trains, based on real-world routes, reinforced the layout of Amtrak’s route structure.  You could work with complex fares and experiment with complicated connections.  You could also build skill with accommodations or trains, like Metroliners, that you might not encounter often.
• As new features went into the live system, they were available immediately in the training system as well.

Safe practice in many live systems is harder than it should be.  Often “harder” means “not possible.”  Less-safe practice can mean goofy messages going to customers.  Phantom sales inflating revenue.  Accidental cancellations of live orders.  Triple demand for supplies.

No matter how firmly your company insists on formal training, your learners and the entire organization  can benefit from support provided on the job by a realistic, feature-rich way to practice skills.

CC-licensed images: a few stakes by TonZ;
log slices by the queen of subtle;
caber toss by notacrime / Gregor Dodson.
Detailed map of the London-Dublin Express is mine.

A while back, George Siemens wrote a post, Questions I’m No Longer Asking. I like the title, and the post even more–because the heart of the post is what he believes about learning, and it’s from that viewpoint that he talks about questions that don’t interest him any more.

(Example: “How can educations implement [whatever tool] into their teaching?  Simple: do it.”)

Siemens lists several points that he’s firmly convinced of.  I read them with an eye toward what I believe in terms of learning in the workplace.  I think several of them are essential to an organization’s ability to effective encourage work-related learning.

No, that’s not the most felicitious phrase I’ve ever written.  It’s apropos, though, because of how I see the way most people earn their living.

Ideally, the workplace is a for-hire alliance.  Whosis, Incorporated (or, for some, the Department of Whosis) wants to get things done and will pay people to help do them.  Individuals presumably want to get paid and possibly have some interest in the things Whosis does.

So there’s a partnership.  And the give-and-take of that partnership extends to work-related learning.

You as an individual need the opportunity, support, resources, and systems to get better at what you do or what you’d like to do, while Whosis needs people who are more and more effective at achieving results that Whosis values.

What does that mean in terms of some of Siemens’s points?  I want to take up this one:

Learners should be in control of their own learning.
Autonomy is key.

For a successful partnership, those workplace learners should be able to relate what they’re learning to key parts of their own job, or to key results that the employer values.  Not every minute, not every task, but definitely over the long haul.

I don’t have much argument with Siemens’s point that “meaningful learning requires learner-driven activity.”  Neither would anyone who’s ever had to present a training course to people who didn’t need or  value the training.

The difference is that in the workplace, over time, most of that meaningful learning has to connect to the organization’s goals.  If not, eventually you won’t have that workplace.

If we’re the Fast Twitch Gym, the ultimate outcome is profitability.  To achieve that, we value things like the breadth and depth of workout options, the availability of a skilled and friendly staff, rate of renewals, class offerings that customers enroll in and stick with, and so on.  If as an organization we thought that we’d accomplish more profitability by selling cars, we probably wouldn’t be in the gym business.

If we’re the Division of Motor Vehicles, then valuable outcomes are things like efficient and convenient issuing of driver licenses and license plates.  Related to those are quantity and quality measures for our record-keeping, our delivery of service, and our cost-effectiveness.

So what?  Well, as an individual, if your personal goals and values press you toward becoming a paralegal, you might not always be able to satisfy those desires entirely through your job at Fast Twitch or the DMV, because these particular workplaces don’t employ that many paralegals.

Siemens is certainly right: nobody’s going to be as interested in your learning as you are.  At the same time, if you’re an employee in an organization, that organization will have goals and values that aren’t necessarily identical with yours.

For the individual, the challenge is to find a satisfactory degree of autonomy: working with problems that engage you; collaborating with coworkers or clients who encourage you do get better at what you do; finding assignments or specializations that are fulfilling.

For the organization, the challenge is often getting away from a not-really-working, event-focused, dose-and-exposure-oriented approach toward skill in the workplace.  If standardization and compliance are important (as in, say, pharmaceuticals or high-tech manufacturing), your workforce already knows that.

Workplace learning isn’t us versus them (or me versus them).  At its best, it’s the individual and the organization having interests and goals that mesh well.

CC-licensed photos:
collaborating at work by Christina Xu;
boredom by Quinn Dombrowski.