Dave's Whiteboard

Many thanks to Andrew Maynard of 2020science for pointing out this great mini-lecture on why nanotechnology is important.  Maybe you’ll get an idea for your next technical explanation.

This is an entry in the ACS NanoTube contest, submitted by Irene Suarez-Martinez and Chris Ewels.  Lots more nano-science at the contest site, and at Nano2Hybrid.net, where Suarez-Martinez and Ewels work.

Yesterday, thanks to Twitter, I got to eavesdrop on a DC-based conference on social media in government. This morning I’ve got an array of interesting pages open, all connected in some way to things I found through the stream.

Musings on 2.0 Culture Change

Not the first post like this, but Jeffrey Levyis director of web communications for the Environmental Protection Agency.  His list is good, and this item worth repeating here:

Know the policy framework. Not doing so risks running into brick walls at high speed. And when you do that, you often bounce backward. Whereas if you know the policies, you know which walls are brick, which are sponge, which are 3 feet high by 3 feet wide and which are 30 feet high and 2 miles long. Bonus: knowing the walls tells you where to push for change.

Design for the Other 90%

Olivier Blanchard starts by quoting Paul Polak:  “The majority of the world’s designers focus all their efforts on developing products and services exclusively for the richest 10% of the world’s customers. Nothing less than a revolution in design is needed to reach the other 90%.”

Blanchard’s talking mostly about marketing, but I can’t help seeing some learning-design points there as well, which connects nicely with…

10 Harsh Truths about Corporate Websites

Paul Boag writes in Smashing from a web designer’s perspective.  Advice like this applies to other situations:

“If you want to get the maximum return on your Web team, present it with problems, not solutions. For example, if you’re targeting your website at teenage girls, and the designer goes for corporate blue, suggest that your audience might not respond well to that color. Do not tell him or her to change it to pink. This way, the designer has the freedom to find a solution that may even be better than your choice. You allow your designer to solve the problem you have presented.”

Online Networking ‘Harms Health’

…perhaps in the way that superficial reporting harms judgment.  The BBC enlightens us with one more bogeyman-sighting.  The biologist in question apparently wouldn’t agree with the authors of…

From Andragogy to Heutagogy

“Heutagogy” (the study of self-determined learning) seems even less likely to catch on as a term than Malcolm Knowles’s “andragogy.”  Still, this paper by Stewart Hase and Chris Kenyon makes some telling points:

A most important characteristic of a capable organisation is the capacity for managers to empower others, to share information, and develop capability… It is perhaps surprising that many managers continue to ignore the evidence of the success of such approaches to people in organisational management.

The reasons for this lack of change might be found in the way in which managers are trained or maybe not trained. There is a heavy emphasis in our management schools and in organisations on the technical aspects of management. The plethora of short management training programs attests to the simplistic approaches we take in addressing management deficiency.

Tom Kuhlmann manages the user community for Articulate and writes the Rapid E-Learning Blog.  I value the pragmatism and good sense in his posts–like yesterday’s, with the subtle title, Here’s How You Can Save Your Training Job in this Economy.

I know, I know, there’s a lot of rumination on the conceptual mountaintops about the role of training, learning, and whether we shouldn’t just fling everyone into the deep end of the informal pool.

Still, you can hardly argue with Tom’s contention that when organizations have to make tough decisions, they lean on things that provide the most value.

His audience is people who develop training, and he offers ways to deliver value faster.  Obviously, he does that with Articulate’s tools most of the time, but he wields the tolls with good sense.  Good sense is transitive–you can study Tom’s examples and apply the principles to your own challenges.

A handful of points to encourage you to read his post:

• Rapid elearning brings down the cost of production–but no software replaces sound instructional design.
• People aren’t course-deficient.  Focus on having people meet their work goals, not on having them take courses.
• A large part of elearning is visual design.

Tom’s example comes from an elearning shootout in which the competitors reworked a sales course for an atomic-powered clock.  Tom didn’t bother explaining the display.  “If I am telling the customer that the display is…easy to read, then I shouldn’t need a big long explanation of how to read it.”

My favorite line: 

What did the training industry do before Jeopardy?

Tom thinks a lot like Thiagi when he says to design your learning interactions to match the desired outcome.  In other words, don’t slap a game template on because “people understand the game.”  You want the interaction to make sense in context, not remind people of Alex Trebek.

Pool photo by POSITiv.
Alex Trebek screen shot by Von Roeder.

While looking for something else, I came across a link to The Thiagi Group, a consultancy founded by the relentlessly energetic Sivasailam Thiagarajan.

For decades, Thiagi’s been a kind of performance trickster, playing with preconceptions (and with card tricks) while encouraging professionals to do more to encourage learning.

The link I found was to Thiagi’s 1999 article on rapid instructional design.  You get a sense of his style with one of the stated objectives:

Reduce self-doubt and guilt by positively associating cheaper and faster instructional design with better learning effects.

You could do a lot worse than read the article, with its ten strategies and twenty guidelines for rapid instructional design.  What stood out for me on this reading was his opening discussion of tradeoffs, intended “to prevent you from sacrificing the effectiveness of the product for the efficiency of the process.”

(Last year, an online course I worked on required sixty-five different documents before getting to actual content for an actual topic in an actual lesson.  Now that’s process.)

The first tradeoff  is between design and delivery. As Thiagi points out, if you have lots of resources for delivery, you can skimp on design.  If you have limited resources for delivery (few instructors, tight schedules0, you can’t.

“The basic idea here is that you pay now or pay later.”

No, that’s not a new idea.  On the other hand, we get snow pretty much every winter here in the Washington DC area, yet each year, when the first flakes arrive, thousands of people (including TV weather reporters) react as if bowls of petunias were dropping from the sky.

“Not new” isn’t the same as “understood.”

Thiagi’s second trade-off involves the three elements of effetive instruction:

• Presentation of new information to learners.
• Activities through which learners process the information and produce a response.
• Feedback to learners to reinforce or remediate.

You could argue that people learn without someone helping with that presentation, and I’d agree.  Most of the time, though, especially in job-related learning, something deliberate is going on.  I think Sachi and Lee LeFever are terrific, but you don’t learn to use social bookmarks just by watching a Common Craft video.  Sooner or later, you’ve got to try bookmarking–and figuring out what went wrong when something does.

Back to Thiagi and that second set of tradeoffs:

Whether these three components are applied at a micro level (as in the case of step-by-step directions on how to tie a shoe string) or at a macro level (as in the case of a global case study on cross-cultural sensitivity), they are essential in all instructional packages. When instructional designers falsely assume that any one of these three components is sufficient, the result is false economy and faulty instruction.

To provide a few stereotypical (and nongeneralizable) examples, college professors primarily present information; self actualization gurus focus exclusively on processing by learners; and significant others typically concentrate on giving feedback. The result in all these cases is incomplete learning.

Thiagi.com is crammed with free resources.  By design.

Note: persons attempting to find a motive in this posting will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a meme in it will be shot.

Pisces: Your detractors are misguided; there is not an upper limit to the number of slides you can have in a one-hour PowerPoint presentation.

Thanks to you, though, there soon will be.

Aries: Good news: the CEO said the LMS you recommended was “a hit.” Bad news: just before that, she said, “We’re really taking…”

Taurus: Friends are concerned about your failing memory: your blogroll links to your own blog.

Gemini: You’re jazzed about microblogging, but remember: the number of U.S. households with birds as pets is twice the number of people using Twitter.  It’s true: parakeet, the original tweet.

Cancer: Networking pays off this month as you’re invited to address the National Association of Professional Keynote Givers.

PKG09 will be in Manhattan, though budget cuts have shifted the venue to the Grand Central Terminal concourse.

Leo: Don’t let the opinions of others deter you from creating a new image.  Keep in mind, however, that a shaved head and a goatee are not mandatory for speakers at TED.  Especially for women.

Virgo: You’re always open to learning new things.  This week, you’ll learn that “smile sheet” does not mean that you made people smile.

Libra: People with your sign like to get things done.  People with your boss’s sign prefer you do the things that have been assigned to you.   Meanwhile, the Scorpio two cubicles down has just updated his Facebook page with “updating my Facebook page.”

Scorpio: No, the Libra two cubicles up the hall does not have more followers than you.  She does, however, suspect that there’s no battery in your iPhone, and has noticed that the icons you painted on it never move.

Sagittarius: Like most Archers, you desire independence and new experiences.  For the near future, however, you’ll struggle with incorporating YouTube clips into the three-day workshop on Safety Compliance for Senior Auditors.  (Could Ning help?)

Capricorn: Coworkers appreciate your efforts to share and spread knowledge through social tools.  Try to restrain your eagerness for guidelines, however.  Several colleagues refer to you as the Wiki Witch of the West.

Aquarius: You’ve created many opportunities for using your skills through your extensive use of LinkedIn.  Last week’s messages to five anonymous contacts have paid off.  One of them will call you within the hour.  He’s your boss’s boss.

Redlining photo by NathanFromDeVryEET.
Grand Central Terminal clock photo by Matt Garland.
“iFone” photo by Eric Byers.
Opening paragraph ever so slightly inspired by S. L. Clemens.