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.

Jeff Cobb of Mission to Learn notes via Facebook that someone at Wired thinks you shouldn’t blog any more:  Paul Boutin writes that Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004.

I’ve never been a fan of Wired; it’s like the love child of Fast Company and Martha Stewart Living. To me, it’s full of people who don’t think you’re doing things right and all too eager to straighten you out. With that disclosure out of the way…

Boutin sounds a bit like the graying souls who remember how great [insert website name here] used to be — you know, before [insert point in time here]. To the extent that there are shills, opportunities, and scam-meisters behind blogs, why is he surprised? That’s what happens with technology: people start using it in ways that you didn’t expect.

Can’t you just hear copyists in England bitching and moaning about how great publishing was before William Caxton set up that damned printing press?

Just because entire cable channels shriek about attractive  young white women who’ve disappeared doesn’t mean you should stop watching television.

Boutin says that “the time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook or Twitter.”  As a comment to his article notes, “You used a long blog post to announce the death of blogging? There could be some baby in that bathwater…”

I don’t think I even want to know how Boutin defines “better spent.” How is this snit different from saying, “You oughta be watching Henry IV (Part One) instead of Dancing with the Stars?”

Or vice-versa?

He focuses on the fact that the top 100 Technorati sites are dominated by professionals. If your burning ambition is to have a two-digit Technorati ranking, then you’ve got a lot of flacking to do.  (You’re also way too busy to read my blog.) Otherwise, have some coffee and relax.

It’s true, as Boutin points out, that blogs made self-publishing easy. And sites like Flickr or YouTube make it easy to public visual or audio material.

Still, although he says that the real appeal of Twitter is brevity, it took him over 600 words to say that. (That’s a standard op-ed column size, by the way; he’s not exactly trailing clouds of innovation across the digital sky.)  Based on character count, he could have managed it in 28 tweets — but that wouldn’t suit Wired, which I assume pays by the article and not by the Twitter volume.

To me, Boutin is confusing the product (blog posts) with the process (communicating). He’s also paying way too much emphasis to advertising and revenue, topics that easily turn the blogosphere into an Amway convention.

If your interest is in having conversations, rather than inviting people over so, once they’re gone, you can check under the cushions for the change they spilled , then Boutin’s “discovery” is less than startling.

Not having a blog because Robert Scoble (or Tina Brown) does is as silly has having one because he does. Blog software lets you be all about you — your interests, your opinions, your passions, your distractions. Whether anyone joins in is optional.

Printing press photo by Vlasta2.

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.

Last year on the Whiteboard, I mentioned the Six Boxes^TM model for performance management. Six Boxes now has a blog, and principal Carl Binder’s Beware of MSU is well worth reading.

MSU in this case is not Michigan State — Binder was talking to customer service reps about the problems that arise when people lack knowledge or can’t find what they need.

In reply, one rep said, “Oh, you’re talking about going to MSU.” As in, Makin’ Stuff Up.

Mnemonics can help people organize and retain information. While I hardly ever do biological classification, “King Philip, come out, for God’s sake” certainly retrieves kingdom-phylum-class-order-family-genus-species from my longterm memory. Binder is in favor of tools to help people master constructs or basic facts.

But you don’t want to go to MSU, he says, if that means you try and fit a model onto the world without starting by looking at what’s in the world. In other words,

…We need to resist the tendency to create clever frameworks, concepts, and categories a priori (before we observe), but instead really look at behavior and its outputs, catalog them, see how they actually cluster together, and describe them accordingly. This is often sloppier and more difficult than armchair concept creation because the actual work outputs and behavior might not be immediately obvious, and one might have to observe and interview repeatedly, dig more deeply, and gather more information to determine what is actually the case.

You see the aftereffects often. How many people in the training/development world talk about “form, storm, norm, perform” as if they’re an add-on to Newton’s laws, as opposed to a rhyming version of a simple model? Will Thalheimer valiantly tackled another example that just won’t stay dead (that nonsense about how you remember only 10% of what you read but 80% of what you do).

As Joe Harless said (and Binder quotes), an ounce of analysis is worth a pound of objectives.

Harold Jarche via Twitter pointed me to this video with Jay Cross. As he points out on Informal Learning Blog, it’s a demonstration of “direct to the cloud” — nobody had to save the video and then upload it.

Sun’s Charles Beckham says this feature means that making your video available becomes a kind of utility — encoding and streaming happen on the fly. (Since the video ends up on a server, it’s not exactly true that there’s no file — but it is true that you don’t have to worry about the file.)

I believe it’s the voice of Sun’s Karie Willyerd asking about the next level of applying this. She’s addressing what I think of as the lining around the cloud. Honestly, my first reaction to this demo was dismay: “Dear lord — now millions of people can crank unedited stream-of-consciousness and call it ‘online learning.’”

But nothing in this technology requires that you just shoot your mouth off, just as (Edward Tufte notwithstanding) nothing about PowerPoint requires that you bore people to death). As Beckham says toward the end of the video, “The real expert who can use Camtasia — knock it out.” I take that to mean, hey, we’ve got this tool to make it easy to publish video. Whether it’s boring video or pretty-good video or transformative video is up to you. “If we have to teach ‘em how to produce something, it’s a bug…. all we care about is the IP and the brain cells of everybody who works here.”