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Learning about learning

Ribbons, Awards & 15 Minutes of Fame

3/21/2016

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Guild master? Me?

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Last week was the eLearning Guild's 2016 Learning Solutions Conference. I love going to this conference because it consists of kindred spirits; people who get learning, what works, and are passionate to share those ideas. It's a community of practice that gathers in Orlando to learn. Yeah, I'm a learning junkie. I fly to Orlando and sit in hotels to learn about learning and love every minute of it.  

During this year's second day opening session, the 2016 Guild Masters were announced. I was stuck in Orlando traffic, so I missed the announcement. In reading the back channel Twitter feed, I saw that the late Jay Cross was honored with this title and that made me cry. Jay is credited with inventing the term elearning, and taught us that most of the learning occurs outside of training - informally. He was truly one of my heros. 
Then the feed started congratulating me. For what? All day long people were congratulating me for who knows what. It wasn't until late in the day that David Kelly presented me with my award as 2016 Guild Master. Apparently he handled that great awkward silence when I didn't pop up by asking everyone to have some fun with me and congratulate me without sharing what as they saw me throughout the day. That was fun. I suppose there is some irony in having the two 2016 Guild Masters presented in absentia this year. After all, we are about the virtual thing in elearning. 

I was astounded, humbled and honored to be included with the likes of those who have taught ME so much: Clark Quinn, Jane Bozarth, Chad Udell, Michael Allen, Mark Rosenberg, Allison Rossett, Joe Ganci, Conrad Gottfredson and Bob Mosher. All I know in this business I have learned from those who have been willing to share what they know with others. 
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Go figure. My 15 minutes of fame and I missed it stuck in traffic.

So what does a guild Master do, anyway?

Today is the first day back to work after receiving this award, and I'm sitting here wondering what the heck a Guild Master is supposed to do, anyway, when it hit me. More of the same. For me, that's sharing what I know with others. It's not about being the professorial sage on the stage. It's about learning together. Noodling with others on the best way to do things. Mentoring other IDs on dealing with the SME who can't meet deadlines, who don't get this learning thing at all and want to dump more content than any human can absorb in a few days into a 15 minute elearning module. I have loved developing the IDs on my teams, watching the lightbulbs go off, and seeing them move into better learning for their clients. I've also watched them carry that mission forward. (My husband calls that the cult of Jean Marrapodi. )

It's reminding people that the goal of your learning must be able to be encapsulated in one high level sentence. In the end, what do you want them to KNOW and DO? then finding a way to assess that. It's about assessing the right things. Not vocabulary. It's about making things look good so people aren't distracted and the information is organized. It's about listening and learning from others. It's about tweeting new ideas. Retweeting great ideas of others. Taking scissors to red tape. Documenting processes to see how convoluted they are. Challenging "because we've always done it that way".  

It's about always learning. Not just what we do for a living, but applying tangential thinking to what we do to make it better. This year I've been working on human computer interface design and learned a ton from the world of design thinking, and interface design, and the way they explore people's needs to solve problems. We don't do that enough.

It's about attending conferences, sharing workshops and learning from others. I leave on such a high from a conference and can't wait to try out the new discoveries. It's also about connecting with those who are in the trenches making a difference to continue to learn from them.


It's also about encouraging every individual to leverage their strengths; to learn from their mistakes and hear the voice of Abilene telling YOU what she told Mae on a regular basis: You is kind, you is smart, you is important.

Cause you is.
​Now..... what have YOU learned today?

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ATD2015 Wrapup

5/22/2015

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Lessons from the Learner

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You know what hard work learning is the day after a conference ends when you go from highly jazzed to completely fizzled out.
I've just finished six days of intentional learning. From the time my feet hit the floor till I collapsed on my pillow, I was engaged in discovery about learning. I'm pooped! Most of that time I was in Orlando at the Association for Talent Development International Conference and Exposition learning with and from 10,000 people who work building learning for others. I've been at this for twenty years when I made the move from teaching to training. I've seen the name of what we do evolve over the years. Now we call it talent development. Whatever you call it, it's about designing learning to solve business problems.

I learned a ton over the last few days. Here's a recap of the highlights.

Solving Business Problems

Training is often viewed as a cost center in business because we don't generate revenue. However, if we do our job the right way, we become a valued business partner, enabling employees to do their job better and learn new skills. Foundational to that is linking the goals of what we do to the problems businesses need to solve.

When Instructional Design Met Performance CONSULTING

Jim Robinson & Dick Handshaw  Handout Link
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In 1997 when I was working at Bank Boston, my manager had me read Performance Consulting, a few years after it was published. I thought it was interesting, but didn't do much with it. It wasn't until I got involved with MASS ISPI and attended a workshop by Tina Teodorescu that I really understood what this concept was all about.  Since then, I've been doing a lot to connect the dots with the business need and teaching my students and staff to do likewise.

  • Key Takeaways
  • Focus more on the needs of the business as the foundation for learning
  • Leverage the principles of design thinking with SMEs to uncover needs
  • Connect with people. Conferences provide rich opportunities meet other learning junkies.
Performance Consulting is the process of uncovering business problems at the root of what is presented as a training need. It's about examining things systemically, to look for the causes of the problem, which may be related to coaching and feedback issues, process problems, or even a problematic environment. The key is that the business needs inform the performance needs the individuals must do. We uncover those needs through questioning. Dick Handshaw provides an excellent listing of questions on his website. Aligning our training to those uncovered needs ensures we solve the right problem that impacts business results.
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Dick Hanshaw elaborated on the role of instructional design to create the learning solution for the problem. One concept that he has that I've not seen in other models is the blueprint, where everything is laid out prior to production. There is great wisdom in this.
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Building Strategic Linkages: Map and Measure Your Learning Strategy

Ajay Pangarkar       Handout Link
In this workshop we also talked about meeting business goals but by looking at things strategically. We looked at how business maps things out:
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Then we looked at how this is measured, using a balanced scorecard approach:
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My takeaway from this session was to look for the metrics being used to measure in the business and see how we might leverage them in training, and to focus on more alignment of learning goals with business goals.

Innovating Learning Through Design Thinking Interview Techniques

Amanda Chavez and Katarzyna Siedlecki      Handout Link
Design Thinking has become pretty trendy in business. It's a way to bring about innovation by leveraging the principles of design, which basically is iterative problem solving. There's a lot of research coming out of Stanford about Design Thinking and they even have a 90 Minute Crash Course you can take to learn it. 
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Depending on the model, you'll get pictures like these to depict design thinking. The one on the top is the model used at Stanford, and the one on the bottom is the model used at Booz Allen Hamilton presented in the workshop. The principles are similar in the world of instructional design, but with design thinking the ideate process is a bit more fluid and creative. I loved the idea of doing this with the subject matter experts that I work with to toss around ideas to generate a better end product. In this workshop and a similar one I attended during the week, we used mindmapping, post-it notes, and brainstorming techniques as part of the problem definition, and solution generating process. I definitely want to experiment more with this.

If you want to know more, there's a great infographic at the Design Management Institute.

I came, I Learned, I presented.

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I was able to share some of my expertise with people in my session on Ubiquitous Learning: Leveraging the Strengths of Online Learning. Having done all of the development work I did for the college over the past five years, I've seen some things that work well, and that really don't in online learning, and was able to show some examples of things that I've used with great success. Online learning is everywhere, and we miss out on a great opportunity not to leverage it. I had several international folks come up to me after the session to inquire if I'd fly to their company to present my workshop. We shall see where that goes. For now, we continue to learn. I spent several hours this evening going through the handouts for the sessions I was unable to attend. That's one of the benefits of online learning and access: I was able to extend the learning another day, and through mediums like this blog, share ideas with others to continue to learn. I love that. Don't you?

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Unexpected Learning

5/18/2015

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Musings from ATD2015

I'm in Orlando at the Association for Talent Development International Conference and Exposition, fondly known in the industry as ATD ICE. This is my second year, and I'm still amazed by the mammoth size of this event. I forgot from last time that I should have prepared for the Boston Marathon prior to coming here. This place is HUGE and I'm convinced that I am walking several miles between the parking lot and between sessions. 

It's also an interesting thing to see the family gathering atmosphere that occurs here as people who have made connections over the years reconnect at the conference. There's lots of catching up, and I suspect that there are some job connections that come from this event as people build their PLN. One the flip side, if you come alone, things can be daunting and feel clique-ish. It's important to realize that things are not like that at all. Everyone is welcome and often invited. 

The discoveries so far have been rather unexpected.

MUSING One
GIRLFRIEND, Get Down Off Your PRIVILEGED High Horse

When I arrived in town I picked up my rental car and began to grumble about how uncomfortable it was and WHAT! It didn't have power windows and locks. It's a Kia Rio, and definitely NOT a car I'd ever buy for myself because the headrest pitches you toward the windshield and it's really hard to get comfortable.

I drove from the airport to the timeshare I'd rented for the week. RCI had a special promotion of an extra week of vacation for $249, so I cancelled my reservation at the Hyatt, right next to the convention center, and booked a week at the High Point World Resort. The pictures looked good, and the reviews were mainly five star. I'd always had wonderful resorts whenever we'd stayed at RCI places, so I had great expectation, especially after the resort we stayed at for Learning Solutions with its full service, incredible food, poolside restaurant by the enormous pools with multiple hot tubs and posh accommodations.

This place was a little different. My GPS sent me to the strip with all the cheap souvenir shops and down a tiny road to what looked like a pre-fab housing development of budget townhouses. The welcome center was two guys at a desk. One checked me in and the other handed me a stack of paperwork about the "amenities" which included a hot dog roast by the pool in the middle of the complex on Wednesday night.

I found my unit and walked into 1980 complete with the brown canvas couch, the VCR and the Formica furniture in the bedroom, complete with mirrored closet doors.

It looked clean anyway, so I settled where I met the lizard running around the walls of my living room. Oh boy. Could this get any worse? At least it wasn't a mouse. 

I posted something on the ATD Facebook page about the lizard and Michele Lawson suggested I give him a red feather and invite him for networking. So I named him Richard, after someone I'd met at dinner, and decided I could deal with him.

It's funny, how that little bit of perspective changed everything. Last night when I got back Richard was no where to be found, despite his very visible dashing presence the night before. I was kind of sad about that.

This morning I woke up and realized that this place would be luxurious if I were in India and decided that it's not so bad after all, even though the wi-fi is not working. I have a hot spot on my phone. What's the big deal? What was so annoying yesterday is not so much of a bother. I realized that I needed to get down off my high horse and be grateful for having a place that saved me a ton of money and a car that gets me to the conference safely. I have sneakers to wear to be comfortable in the marathon walk from the parking lot, and can walk off some of the calories from the fabulous meals we've been eating. So first lesson learned: In the moments of tiredness, annoyances are bigger than they really are. Get over it and put things in perspective.

MUSING TWO
UNexpected Conversations

I was invited to dinner gatherings by two people I'd never met before, and I'm so grateful to Michelle Lawson and Megan Torrance, who gathered together random groups of people to go to dinner. I ate at Margianno's Italian restaurant and Fogo de Chao Brazilian Steak Houses; both places I wouldn't have stumbled on. The food was great but the company was really fascinating.

I met Richard and Austin from Sage Media out in Denver. They do video, which was pretty interesting, but the conversation evolved to elements of film, which is something I know next to nothing about. It was really interesting piecing fragments of the conversation together with my little knowledge store in this area. I wonder how often that happens in our training classes? Definitely something to think about to make sure that I attach new concepts to something familiar.

On Sunday I had breakfast with Aaron Silvers, a long time Twitter friend of mine who is an expert in xAPI, and his friend Russell Duhon. It was interesting hearing the geek side of the process and the evolution from SCORM, something no one really understands, but we are expected to conform learning in our LMS to it. I wish my friend Jason Kramer would have been there. He'd have eaten that up. Perhaps another conference.

Musing Three
Learnings So Far

I've been focusing on instructional design at this conference. I attended a workshop on Design Thinking for Instructional Designers with Angel Green from Allen Interactions. She walked us through some exercises we could use with our SMEs, which generated an oh duh! moment for me: Leverage Design Thinking Principles with our SMEs. I'd recently taught the principles of Design Thinking to my team of IDs and never thought to have them use that with their SMEs.

After teaching my session, I went to a workshop with Dick Handshaw and Jim Robinson called When Instructional Design Meets Performance Management. I'm trained in both disciplines, but it was really nice to have a refresher from the people who were key influencers in practices we use today. I'd never thought about the importance of getting to the right SME to identify the business issue, and that often means escalating a level or two. I plan to share their slides with my team and work a little harder to dig out the business issue around the behavior problem or need we need to solve for. When training addresses and corrects a business issue, the business sees training as a valued partner. I returned to Dick's ID workshop today and was reminded yet again how important that is.

Today I attended Ken Blanchard's presentation on the new One Minute Manager. His original book is over 20 years old. Business has changed, but paying attention to employees has not. Connecting, praising and redirecting toward the goal go a long way in developing people. It's amazing to have been able to see the pioneers and leaders in our discipline in person. 

Reflection is important

I've been tweeting up a storm at this conference. It's been great meeting people, and sharing the nuggets that I've been discovering in workshops. I really appreciate having the handouts available and online so I can go back to them and add them to my notes. I'm not convinced I appreciate the long trek from one end of the building to another between workshops and from parking to the conference, but I have appreciated having quiet time to reflect like this.

I've learned a lot so far. How about you?
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Lessons From Learning Solutions

3/30/2015

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Loving Learning

I'm at Learning Solutions 2015, in Orlando, Florida. It's big conference #2 of 3 for me for this year. I just love this stuff. I presented a program this year on Universal Design for Learning (UDL), which was a new topic to many. UDL is about making learning accessible and equivalent for all learners.  Most elearning designers generate a transcript for audio portions of video, select colors that are color-blind friendly, and may even write tags for pictures that are screen reader friendly. UDL goes beyond that and considers the remedial learner, the gifted learner, the ESL learner, the dyslexic learner and any other learner who may take the program, and provides avenues that consider varied ways to present the WHAT of learning (representation) the HOW of learning (activities and expressions) and the WHY of learning (engagement). Thinking through and planning for these learners makes for a richer experience that benefits all. I'll write more about that another time. 

Motivation

I've been coming to this conference nearly every year since 2002 during the early years of the eLearning Guild. This is such a great conference! I love being able to present, I love attending with sessions, I love the learning, but most of all, I love connecting with the people that I meet. I have learned so much over the past 13 years from my colleagues as we have wrestled together over issues, and learned from one another. The Guild truly is a community of practice, and has been a catapult for my career.  I've had the opportunity to introduce my colleagues to the Guild and this year had the privilege of watching two people from my former team present for the first time. Now I get to watch them grow as they connect the dots from the people they have met and the workshops they attended.

This year I got to meet some new friends whose workshops took me in directions I've never considered before, despite working in eLearning for 18 years.

New Faces, New Discoveries

Hadiya Nuriddin
Focus Learning Solutions


Hadiya presented on leveraging non-fiction writing techniques for writing elearning scenarios. I'd never thought about that before. Thinking about the constructs of plot, story line and context made a lot of sense. Thinking about whose perspective you are writing from and for was a big keeper as well. 

As a bonus, I learned about RACI charts on her website. Definitely a keeper for project management role definitions!

David Glow
Business Critical Learning

I've been chatting with David on Twitter, where he is @criticallearner, for several years so it was really fun to meet him in person. He taught us a slew of training hacks. My two favorites were using Siri to transcribe audio, and to change the extension of a PPTx file to .zip and it will extract all of the images in the file into a folder called Images. That is super helpful when you are moving things over from a storyboard.
Ty Marbut
Ty Marbut Instructional Videos

Ty is a twenty-something who ran circles around me. For those of you who know me well, that takes some doing. Ty showed me a bunch of neat video tricks and introduced me to the concept of interactive videos, which isn't nearly as hard as one would imagine. I love the concept and can't wait to try this one out. 
Dave Anderson
Community Manager, Articulate

I'd read Dave Anderson for years, so it was fun to come and learn some tricks from him in person. He taught us to leverage mindmapping to create a design treatment for an elearning piece. We walked through six steps, and came out with the colors, fonts, elements and people types that belong in a piece. That was fun and complemented Hadiya's piece really well. 
Jason Kramer & Naomi Pariseault
NECB eLearning

This was their first conference presentation, and it was fun to watch their creativity unleashed.


One Day to Go!

If we weren't full enough, there's yet another half day tomorrow, ending with a keynote on Design Thinking. I'm looking forward to topping off my learning tank for the week with some new inspiration.  Thank you eLearning Guild for the hard work to pull this off year after year.

So.... if you're here, what did you learn this week?
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Why do we Love Conferences & Hate Training?

2/10/2015

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I've spent the last couple of days at Training 2015 sharpening the saw in my talent toolbox. As a trainer and instructional designer, I'm continually looking to improve my craft. I've learned a ton in the different sessions, much with direct applicability to my job, and look forward to trying out the new ideas.
I love conferences, and my friends might consider me a conference junkie. During this event, I've been struck by the fact that most of the workshops I've attended have been lectures with PowerPoint slides, one of the things that people lament about as being the dreadful part of training. I've been totally engaged by the content, and left making connections to my world. What is it about conferences that make them engaging that is such a contrast to much of our training that puts people to sleep?

At A Conference

  • User selection
    In most conferences, there are choices to be made during workshop slots. Program titles and descriptions are provided, and attendees select the sessions they would like to attend. There is interest and investment in attending.
  • Audience match to the topic
    In a conference, we have like-minded people in attendance. 

    Conferees generally have some grounding in the topic, even if it is new to them. The jargon is familiar, and the context of the topic is understood. 
    Slides are crafted to impress, since the presentation is often to a peer group. 
  • Expert's View of Specific, Condensed Content
    Workshops are presented on topics in the presenter's area of expertise. Many times, the presenter has submitted a proposal that was reviewed and vetted by a selection committee. Since the audience is often new to the topic, the high points are covered to provide a taste of that expertise and enough insight to be able to ensure the attendees leave feeling informed, and often equipped with something to implement. There is a laser focus on a slice of the presenter's knowledge and experience.
  • Right-sized Timeframe
    Workshops tend to run 60-90 minutes at a conference. This constraint creates the need for careful planning. When a person is asked to present at a conference, s/he is given a small window of time and needs to determine exactly what will fit into those few minutes. Workshops must fit into that schedule another program needs to occupy the space when it concludes.  

At a Training

  • Someone else determines attendance
    In most companies, training fulfills a requirement. Whether it is compliance or learning a new software, it is someone else's idea that the learner attend.
    Learners may not be vested or interested.
  • Varied Audience
    In theory, at a training event, the audience is level set. A particular type of employee is required to attend. If the trainer has done a thorough needs analysis, strengths and weaknesses of the population are understood and the curriculum matches the need.
    More often, training is one-size-fits-all with no variance for needs of differing populations.
  • Expansive Content Presented by a Facilitator
    Training is often bloated with unnecessary content. Nice-to-know is not separated out from need-to-know. Classes are presented by trainers who may not be experts, but rather new learners a few steps ahead of the trainees. If an expert is invited in, s/he may not be able to distill content to critical points. Additionally, content may not have relevance to the learner's job today. 
    Too much information creates cognitive overload, and learners become overwhelmed, unable to filter out key points.
  • Timeframe May Be Too Long
    Living in a faced paced society combined with the impact of television has shortened learner attention spans. Six or seven hours of training, especially when learners are not completely engaged, is exhausting. Unless the material is properly scaffolded, the learners will lose ground as time goes on. 
    Time is bloated to match the content.

So What?

What does all this mean for us? How can we create right-sized learning that learners are invested in? 
  1. First, we need to consider the needs of the learner. We need to understand their current job and how this training fits into it. 
  2. Second, we need to strip out any fluff and keep the main thing the main thing. What's the critical nugget(s) that your learners need to leave with? We need to make sure to identify that and reinforce it throughout the program.
  3. Thirdly, we need to think about designing to a timeframe, rather than build until it is finished and determining the time at the end. If you know you have a half day to accomplish something that might have taken three without a constraint, you'll work hard to ensure that the key points are the keys.


Impossible, you say? I'm not so sure. We do it with conferences all the time.
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    Jean Marrapodi

    Teacher by training, learner by design.

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