Dave’s Whiteboard

Thanks to Christy Tucker for highlighting a post that connects to “work at learning.” Stephen Downes via eLearn Magazine offers Ten Web 2.0 Things You Can Do in Ten Minutes to Be a More Successful E-learning Professional.

Two things that leapt out at me:

• Sites like Digg, Metafilter, and Hotlinks are great for browsing and serendipitous discovery.
• Keep your writing activity to less than 10 minutes—make a point quickly and then click “submit.”

In other words: consciously open yourself to things you might not otherwise come across; act on what catches your interest.

Photo by Nick Violi.

Catching up on my NetVibes page, I clicked my way to Language Log, and Mark Liberman’s soliloquoy, When Bad Interaction Happens to Good People.

It’s well worth reading, but here’s the gist: Liberman’s university installed FacilityFocus, a computer system through which students, faculty, and others could report maintenance problems (leaky faucets, broken windows, that sort of thing). Liberman describes the system as “highly buzzword-compliant,” so you know where this is going. As he says,

…We’re asking everyone to enter their (non-emergency) work requests via the web interface to FacilityFocus. And that web interface is a wonderful example of what can go wrong when a designer fails to heed Geoff [Pullum]’s advice…

“…Put yourself in the place of a person who did not work with the developers of the operating system, someone who sees your dialog box without the benefit of any prior experience with the way you conceptualize things, and … ask yourself whether they would understand what to do”.

Far more easily said than done, especially here on earth. So much so that Liberman created a kind of job aid for the system: The Legend of FacilityFocus. From the introduction:

• Penn has contracted with an outside supplier, Maximus, to provide a Penn-specific version of the FacilityFocus software. This provides wonderful new functions for automation and integration and tracking — but from the point of view of a College House resident trying to get a light-switch fixed or a sink unclogged, the Maximus web interface is not exactly user-friendly.

• In fact, you can win only if you know which screens to visit in which order, which fields to fill out and which to ignore, which secret codes to use, and so on. If you’ve ever played a game like The Legend of Zelda, you know the general concept. And if you haven’t — well, good luck, you’re about to find out!

Yep, it’s a gamer-style cheat sheet, both funny and well-done. Imagine you’re trying to get the a/c or lighting for your office fixed, then go read it. I’ll wait.

Read the rest of this entry »

Several years ago, the FDA ran a campaign to reduce sales of tobacco to minors. One sign showed a convenience store clerk with a cartoon-style balloon:

You need cigarettes?
I need some ID.
Hey, we all got needs.

As Cathy Moore said the other day, when it comes to designing training, I too am a big advocate of writing the questions before you write the main materials.

When I say “questions,” especially at the outset, I’m really asking, “What do you want people to do?”

Take, for example, those convenience-store clerks. A challenge in these stores is preventing tobacco sales to minors.

I worked on a project to redesign training for the clerks. The original test items were real stumpers like “Is it legal to sell cigarettes to someone who’s 15?” A good example of a poor albeit fact-based question.

Poor, because if people can pass the test without taking the training, the training’s not worth much.

What’s more, convenience-store managers know that a brand-new clerk can answer the question correctly. A good thing, since turnover can be as high as 400%. But there are lots of things the new hire can’t do (and that some current clerks can’t do well) even if the manager’s standing there.

Things like:

• Decide when to ask for ID
• Identify acceptable forms of ID
• Check for the validity of the ID
• Refuse a sale in as customer-friendly a way as possible
• Respond to specific difficult situations like drop-and-run (customer drops money on the counter and runs out of the store with the smokes)

I’m simplifying here — for example, individual states have their own specific requirements. A state might require a particular type of sign, for example. Signage, though, isn’t really the clerk’s responsibility, except perhaps to replace a damaged sign.

By focusing on what we want the clerks to do, we can work toward figuring out what information they need, what judgments they have to make, and what strategies can most effectively get them there.

Take the objective, “decide whether to ask for ID.” One approach to getting there is “decide if customer looks younger than 27.” Why 27? Because it’s too hard to guess age, as in, “does she look like she’s over 18?”

The client’s instructors knew that clerks sometimes resisted this reframing, and had developed exercises to underscore the difficulty of guessing if someone’s over 18. After eight or ten attempts to guess age based on photos, the clerks generally agreed on the usefulness of “asking down.” And on the value of consistently asking for ID from anyone who looks younger than 27.

Those design decisions flow from questions that make up a high-level assessment for the training program. No, they don’t appear as Mager-style objectives. The audience is implicit (convenience-store clerks), and the conditions aren’t detailed (certain types of customers in certain transations), but the performance is clearly observable.

Which makes it easier for the client and the developer to agree on what a properly trained employee should do.

I like anthologies. How could I go to the beach without Gardner Dozois? And while I might be financially better off without Green Linnet’s Celtophile series of CDs, my shelves and my heart would be emptier in more ways than one.

Blog carnivals are a kind of anthology-on-the-fly, a collection of posts from several blogs. For each issue of a carnival, participants post on their own blogs, and a host posts links to all the participating posts. Like with Encephalon, the cognitive-science carnival.

I invited a few people to kick off a carnival under this particular tent: “Work at learning; learning at work.” I was thinking that posts and participants would connect in some way to training or learning in the workplace (as opposed to school or higher education). And I encouraged the invitees to suggest another blogger people might not have read.

Herewith, the first Working/Learning Blog Carnival:

• Michele Martin at The Bamboo Project shares strategies for supporting personal learning environments, nicely tying together the “work at learning” (you have to hone your craft) with “learning at work.”
• Cathy Moore at Making Change explains how to fit the entire world into a multiple choice question. How can you require the learner to think more deeply about on-the-job implications of the information at hand?
• Harold Jarche writes at his eponymous blog about learning at work, offering three easy steps to making sense out of the information that floods past you — as he says, moving from “this is an interesting idea” to “this is what I know.”
• Janet Clarey writes on her blog about working at learning. And she does mean working.
• …and my own contribution, SME? Not for Me, in which I ever so gently nudge people who design training, hoping to move them from subject-matter to practice.

Some other folks weren’t able to contribute in time for this first carnival. I think we’ll do it again and help widen the range of thoughts that people share about working and learning.

In training departments, there’s hardly a more common term than subject-matter expert. Often you’ll hear the initials (S. M. E.) or, alas, the acronym sounded as a single word, bringing to mind Captain Hook’s first mate. That’s an image I’d rather not conjure up, at least outside of a longboat.

The problem with “subject-matter expert” isn’t expertise per se, or even the notion that there’s some body of knowledge — the subject — in which this person is expert.

(You can argue philosophically about whether there’s “content,” or a cluster of skills, but I think you’ll agree that in the world of work you can find people who know relevant facts that other people don’t.)

Often, when clients look for subject-matter experts, they turn to people who presumably know a lot about whatever the job, process, or task is — regardless of whether they actually perform the job.

When I want to know what people really do on the job in question, I avoid even saying “subject-matter expert.” Instead, I borrow a much more helpful term from my friend and colleague John Howe, formerly a training director at the U. S. Department of Labor: I look for an expert practitioner.

That’s someone who:

• Currently does the job
• Produces exemplary results

…and who’s widely seen as outstanding in those two dimensions.

A subject-matter expert can trace the theoretical route of some process (along with its uncles, grandparents, and third cousins twice removed). An expert practitioner can tell you from direct experience how that process operates in the real world of work, why she makes the decisions she does, and what happens as a result.

This isn’t to say you shouldn’t seek out or listen to a subject-matter expert. The programmer who developed ways for Amtrak clerks to program customized commands on their terminals was the western hemisphere’s biggest expert on the technical parameters of this programming.

But the ticket agents and reservation agents who put those keys to work developed myriad ways to apply that programming to real-life problems. Without expert practitioners showing what they did and why they did it, training in how to use the programmed function keys would have been less practical.

And less likely to produce the desired productivity.

(This post is part of the Working/Learning blog carnival for March 2008.)