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Seriously, this is uplifting. I believe 2009 was the year of “more cowbell.”

I just quick wanted to share this blended learning graphic from EMC, a provider of information infrastructure systems (and thanks for letting me use it!).

Because they’ve acquired over 35 companies in the last five years (and have 50 new product launches each quarter), they have 10,000+ people who need an in-depth understanding of products. I would call that a boatload.

I like how they used this three level approach. The formal components include rapid eLearning (Articulate), virtual classroom, and live instructor-led and workshop. Informal learning involves audio and video podcasts, best practice sharing in communities, and coaching and mentoring. EMC used an analytical framework where the level of objective determines the blended learning methodology and delivery approach. A nice model, isn’t it?

Could you disconnect from the Web for a week and still work?

I couldn’t. I was unable to disconnect for even half a week and still work. Not even half a week! Weak.

I started my quest to disconnect by turning off my presence indicators (Skype and Gtalk) and I signed out of my Google account. I scheduled future Workplace Learning Today blog posts. I cleared my feed reader.  I disabled Web access on my BlackBerry.

I learned pretty quickly that email is central to my work and couldn’t get much done without it. Most people working in corporations rely on email to communicate so I must also communicate that way. Without email I would not have known what was going on with the business.If I had planned ahead, I could have had enough work but that isn’t the point. So, I decided (within 24 hours) to go back to Outlook and see email only from co-workers and customers on my brandon-hall e-mail address during this social hiatus experiment. I’d only respond if absolutely critical (I said to myself). A very 1990s approach. I sent one email and responded to one other.

I don’t have a land line phone so really I would have had to locate a pay phone to communicate that way. I justified in my mind that email isn’t really social until you act on it (although that really isn’t true if you hold to the definition of social). Plus, email is one-to-many (web 1.0) vs. many-to-many (web 2.0).

I should have been more realistic and made a goal of not using the social web vs. totally disconnecting. Not using the social web, to me, means not:

• connecting with others online via the web
• collaborating online
• interacting with others on the web

Even though I was unsuccessful with totally disconnecting, I was moderately successful with my plan to abandon the social web (i.e., all things ‘2.0′). I say moderately because I did access the web (WEAK!) to make travel arrangements and used TripIt, an online travel itinerary and trip planner. (Making travel arrangements is like a half-day event for me. It’s a huge time sink and I was procrastinating the details.) TripIt is supposed to make it easier to manage all the details. (So far so good.) At least one person called me out for connecting online with others using TripIt… I thought you were disconnecting this week

Totally busted.

TripIt allows you to share (or invite to share) your travel plans with people you are connected with on other social networks. I imagine the value in that connection is sharing (try this restaurant while you’re in Vancouver) and connecting (you’re in Vancouver, let’s get together). I thought I was just creating an itinerary but not so because my action of using it created other connections.

Could I have called various airlines? Yes, I guess I could have it I knew where there’s a pay phone. But that would probably be a bigger time sink than doing it online and not as easy to compare prices. I could’ve used a local travel agent. I believe either option would have cost me more money than doing it myself on the Web. Especially because I had procrastinated. The social web is great for procrastinators, people looking for greater efficiency, and/or those looking for services that previously were not free.

I also used Doodle to make my schedule available for someone setting up a meeting with multiple people across time zones. I would have been rude not to respond within a day to that invitation, because it was time sensitive.

Time. That’s a common denominator of my two digressions and was what I missed most about the social web. The immediacy. I lost the ability to learn, work, access, and retrieve in real-time. Clearly if the need for immediacy (without regard to time or place) is what you need, the social web is the way to go. Of course life is real-time but my social network is very small (fewer people and limited geographical reach) without the Web.

I also missed getting answers. I realized I rely on search engines and my networks for answers to many questions. I ask a lot of questions. Without the web, I felt lost.

Based on my very limited experiment, the social web is most valuable for me for the following:

• comparative analysis of digital content
• real-time communication in online networks
• time-sensitive digital tasks
• linkage between and among people
• greater reach (work with more people)
• collaboration
• development of relationships
• self-education

I can’t imagine what work would be like without the social web. I wouldn’t be writing this and you wouldn’t be reading this. I wouldn’t know many people who work in the e-learning industry. I wouldn’t be as far ahead in my thinking. It’s like playing up a level in sports. Where else could you connect directly with great minds in the field? It would be hard to do that even at a conference. Being a virtual web worker, I’d  be pretty lonely and isolated too without the social web. My job wouldn’t be as fun and I’d be without some great relationships. Humorous, casual, frustrated, or even personal exchanges are the building blocks of relationships.

One last thing: productivity. I realize I have to find bigger blocks of time where I’m not doing anything. At least a full day with no social web. I also have to find bigger blocks of time for reading books, articles, and papers. Basically, I have to manage my time differently which really isn’t a social web issue at all.

I highly recommend trying this exercise or one like it. It’s been eye opening. It was also an epic fail.

So I sit down at my desk this morning, opened up Gmail as I always do and noticed Google Buzz. I read like 61 trillion tweets about  Google Buzz over the past few days so, of course, I was fatigued with it to begin with. Tweets, blog posts, RSS feed just loaded with it. I was expecting someone to say at breakfast,  ”hey, did you try Google Buzz…what’s that about?” (no one would ever say that to me at breakfast though…make me eggs! is usually about the best I get for breakfast conversation.)

So my point is, I was not enthusiastic. However, being a student of the social web, I jumped right in.

My first thought was HEY wait just a minute there Google, didn’t I just jump into Google Wave in the fall? How is this different? (I dunno because I’ve already forgotten Google Wave.) If a tool or technology can’t capture my attention within the first few hours of trying it, I abandon it and forget it.

I posted my first Buzz message “test.” Outstanding I know. I imagine a bunch of people followed my great content at that point…nearly as good as my “start” status on Twitter. I posted no link, no video, no photo but did do an integration with Twitter, Google Reader, Picasa, and Google chat. I didn’t email my test post, I didn’t “like” anyone else’s stuff, and I didn’t comment on anything. My answer to Google’s question “Share what you’re thinking. Post a picture, video, or other link here” was test. That’s what I was thinking. Another freakin’ test.

I’ve spent about 30 minutes with Buzz so far. I updated my profile. Looks like you can almost make it your one-stop for all things social media.

I don’t have much more to report after just 30 minutes. On the down side, I don’t see how it can support multiple accounts. Right now I can’t open two gmail accounts at the same time. This has always been a problem for me. Sign in, Sign out, Sign in, Sign out. Second, it seems like it will clog up my email (sorry thats “G”mail). I think we should be getting away from email.

And, it seems like Buzz is making a bunch of decisions for me. I can’t properly explain that but Buzz kind of felt like there was going to be some guy around the next corner when I was walking home in the dark. Boo! Oh, it’s just you….my suggested friends. Boo! Oh, it’s just you Pete Cashmore from Mashable and while you’re here Pete, how did you get 12K followers already? (probably with better content than “test.”)

So I’ve hit a wall of sorts. I’m going to go cold turkey for the next week and stay away from all my various social web activities. Instead, I’m going to wake up tomorrow morning and take out a pencil and paper (old school) and document how the lack of social media is impacting my work, learning, and productivity. I’m actually going to disconnect.

It’s appropriate, I think, that Google Buzz is the catalyst because the social web is a bit like addictive drugs but without the craving of munchies. I’ll report back next Friday the 19th.

I’m finally getting around to reading the ASTD State of the Industry Report for 2009 which was released in November. I found this graphic quite interesting. I suspect one of the greatest needs now is to come up with an actual strategy for implementation. Or is the plan just to let the horses out of the barn?

Might I suggest a first step if you’re talking the strategy route – understand the common problems that get in the way of execution and analyze your organization within the context of these overarching things:

• Process and governance
• Technology and standards
• Organizational and learning culture
• Utilization of local and global resources
• Skills and competencies

You’ll be looking for stuff like this:

Initially, I thought governance was out of step with Web 2.0. It’s not. I like this definition of governance from AACSB (my original link is now dead):

Governance is the process of decision-making and the process of implementing (or not implementing) those decisions. Learning governance consists of planning for learning, allocating investments to learning, and managing those investments.

Governance should be aligned with business objectives and performance goals. You’ll have a better shot at getting resources and support with common goals. That might be a no brainer but some organizations are a bit out of step.

If your goal is to create an environment for collaborative learning using technology, you’ll have to discuss a specific strategy for technology.

Not readily available to me is this oldie but goodie: Itami, H. & Numagami, T. (1992). Dynamic Interaction Between Strategy and Technology.
Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 13, 119-135. ABI/INFORM Global.

They defined three relationships between strategy and technology:

1. between current strategy and current technology
2. between current strategy and future technology
3. between future strategy and current technology

Typical questions they proposed include:

• How should technology be used as a tool?
• When should technology be introduced?
• What type of strategic focus is most effective given the constraints on the technology available?
• How should the organization cope with technological innovation and trends?

Basically, you’ve got a couple of ways to go…piggyback on an existing enterprise-wide strategy or move forward with baby steps.

If strategy is about doing the right things, implementation is about doing things right. (Harvard Business Essentials, 2005)

This is the process I used for executing:

Here’s a two-pager with some key points about learning 2.0.

(This post is based on a report I wrote just over a year ago. I hope you find the excerpts from it helpful.)

Microlearning as a term reflects the emerging reality of the ever-increasing fragmentation [emphasis mine] of both information sources and information units used for learning, especially in fast-moving areas which see rapid development and a constantly high degree of change. (Langreiter & Bolka, 2006)

I see the micro thing (small units of rapidly changing user-generated content, consumed by others in a short time period) becoming more fragmented especially within some of the sillier websites out there (one of which I’ll share in a moment). Lucky you!

Maybe *you* already see it everywhere. It started coming together for me in early 2009 in the land of the bizarre thing we know as the Internet.

When I contrast the “micro thing” with what we often do with e-learning – create and cover everything- I see a missed opportunity. I mean *really* if I had a nickel for every “intro” section I’ve seen in a course (some my own) I’d have a shitload of nickels.

Let me try to put this “micro thing” together in a way that’s (hopefully) helpful to you but that won’t make me more than a #4 on your #1-10 insanity evaluation scale.

Example: The People of Wal-Mart

The People of Wal-Mart site started in August 2009 by “three friends and roommates after an inspirational trip to Wal-Mart.” (Dude, we should start a website….dude, holy shit, CapitalOne and BlackBerry want to advertise here. Cool.). I’ve been “inspired” at Wal-Mart too, just not smart enough to turn that inspiration into gold. I was too busy writing and reading intro sections for e-learning courses. You know…pulling together everything someone must know and/or do for their job or a particular part of their job.

The People of Wal-Mart site works like this: people take pictures of other people inside Wal-Mart and submit their “Wal-Creature.” The site owners make funny headings and if you’ve got a really good photo, you can win a $100 gift card. To Wal-Mart. It’s a slice (or pile) of Americana. You either love it (“quite possibly THE BEST THING i’ve ever seen”) or hate it (“the bigotry is astounding…”).

So, it all started with this first post in August 2009…it’s mild compared to some others.

and most recently this…

then “vehicles” kept showing up…the cars in the parking lot at Wal-Mart.

and so, it becomes a spin-off site…a micro aspect of the original. The new site is called You Drive What? Sears advertises there.

You might just see this as a spin-off (The Colbert Report spinning off from The Daily Show) to make a new hit and/or money. But I’m seeing it as more than that.

The People of Wal-Mart is for people. Not vehicles. And, it’d be hard to confirm that a vehicle was, in fact, parked at Wal-Mart. However, rather than ban cars from the site, the site owners see that pictures of wacky vehicles are something people want and they make it into something new. Still sounds like the typical spin-off. However, one of the differences is that the content is not produced. The People of Wal-Mart site owners don’t know what photo they’re going to get today. The first few vehicle pictures that were submitted probably made the site owners pause.

This is what’s happening everywhere. For e-learning types, it’s a struggle. Where does it fit in the instructional design process (if at all)?

The Digital Curation Center began the work of defining the concepts, goals, tasks and research needs associated with a challenging area (“maintaining and adding value to a trusted body of digital information for current and future use.”)

The term digital curation is used in this call for the actions needed to maintain digital research data and other digital materials over their entire life-cycle and over time for current and future generations of users. Implicit in this definition are the processes of digital archiving and preservation but it also includes all the processes needed for good data creation and management, and the capacity to add value to data to generate new sources of information and knowledge. [emphasis mine]

Curation and long-term preservation of digital resources will be of increasing importance for a wide range of activities within research and education. Through sensors, experiments, digitisation and computer simulation, digital resources and data are growing in volume and complexity at a staggering rate. The cost of producing these resources is very high: satellites, particle accelerators, genome sequencing, and large scale digitisation and electronic publishing collectively represent a cumulative investment of billions of pounds in digital research and learning.
Long-term curation and preservation of digital resources is seen as a challenge which is difficult if not impossible for individual institutions to resolve on their own due to the complexity and scale of the challenges involved.

From the DCCs vision statement:

Curation is the active management and appraisal of data [emphasis mine] over the life-cycle of scholarly and scientific interest; it is the key to reproducibility and re-use. This adds value through the provision of context and linkage: placing emphasis on ‘publishing’ data in ways that ease re-use, with implications for metadata and interoperability. Metadata for resource discovery and retrieval are also important, with mark-up on time/place referencing as well as subject description and linkage to discipline-based ontologies. Special emphasis is required on the descriptive information that allows effective re-analysis of datasets of scientific and scholarly significance, and re-use in new and unexpected contexts, e.g. e-Learning or science history. The demands for linkage to two further domains of scholarly communication and e-Learning must also be understood. [emphasis mine]

Clearly The People of Wal-Mart and You Drive What? are not scholarly, “trusted,” instructional, or scientific but the low-brow in me sees a new role for those in e-learning. I haven’t done any research here. I’m just thinking out loud. So don’t rely on what I say here – I may be misunderstanding digital curators.

However, going back to the insurance industry I once worked in, what I do see is the “Insurance Policy” community website that focuses on discussions of policies which suddenly includes a lot of hypothetical questions from insurance agents that would work well for learning and the need to create a separate space for that community to flourish. And all the other stuff…easy, meta info, etc. So, rather than trying to figure out everything to include, try to figure out how to help people make sense of what is already there. In a manageable way that ultimately is targeted and less time  consuming.

I dunno. What do you think? What can you add? What do you see?

Did you ever see the “results not typical” comment at the bottom of an ad for some product? In the US, it once was* a legal loophole. Something like this:

“This miracle powder worked for this genetically engineered buxom red head with six-pack abs but probably won’t work for fat brunette cows eating Chicken McNuggets in front of the TV.”

It’s (1) potentially damaging (I almost tore my rotator cuff hurling a McNugget at the TV screen) and (2) costly (people blow a ton a money buying “results not typical” products and subsequently consulting with psychiatrists only to learn that it’s all their mother’s fault anyway).

Part of my job (and my nature) has  always been searching for the best, most innovative examples. In my mind, I see inspiration in the “non-typical.” I search for what is typical among non-typical programs and write about it. I hope to inspire. I hope people say, “we could do this…”

But be warned. If you don’t take a “results not typical” mindset when it comes to e-learning, you should. Be inspired but don’t try to be something you can’t. And don’t think you’ll do better than everyone else that is equally typical. You won’t.

I was happy to be asked to participate in a Blog Book Tour for the newly released book Learning in 3D: Adding a New Dimension to Enterprise Learning and Collaboration by Karl M. Kapp and Tony O’Driscoll. The idea of a book tour is to build a discussion around the concepts in a book and to bring thinking about 3D virtual worlds for learning and collaboration into the forefront of discussions in the e-learning space.

This is stop #14 on the tour.

When it comes to virtual worlds for learning, I’m most frequently asked, “who’s doing it?” and “is it working?” Corporations are slow to put resources in areas that are new and, although we’ve been talking about virtual worlds for awhile, they still are new in the world of corporate training. On that point, the authors note that the virtual learning marketplace is just now beginning an accelerated growth path.

I don’t have to look much further than our (Brandon Hall Research’s) Excellence in Learning Awards to see that. We didn’t even have a category for virtual worlds in prior to 2008 and that first year, had just two entries. For the most recent awards program, in 2009, we had 6 entries. Our members also started showing an interest in research about virtual worlds and in 2007 and 2008 we released several reports around the subject.

Chapter 6 in Learning in 3D highlights ten case studies from Microsoft/Sodexo, Cisco, Ernst & Young, U.S. Holocaust Museum, Catt Laboratory, Loyalist College, Ball State University, Penn State University, BP, and IBM. When it comes to the question “who’s doing it?”, you’ll find some great examples. I’ll add another, silver award winner, Vestas Organization and their “Vesta World,” focusing on effectiveness, i.e. “is it working?”

On the 5 different programs Vestas launched by the end of 2008 the pre-test showed an average knowledge and skills level of 37% (where the percentage equals the proportion of correct answers). The post-test showed an average knowledge and skills level of 83%. The average calculated increase in knowledge and skills was therefore 45% points and the average Total Learning achieved was 73%, where the ”Total Learning” refers to how much of the gap was filled between what was known by the learners before the training and a perfect score of 100% after the training. The average Total Learning for all measured classroom training in Vestas in 2008 was 59%.

E-learning Program Manager Peter Christensen said, “We set a very ambitious Total Learning target for e-learning programs in Vestas World. The target was 60 % which is higher than the standard target for effective classroom training. Reaching 73% is a real victory and it proves that we made the right choices in our implementation of the concept.”

What’s exciting about Vestas is that they embraced the uniqueness a virtual world offers and left behind the classic top-down learning style. They said this led to more effective learning.

The business needs and issues were met by building a unique Virtual World that introduced a visual style that all employees can relate to as a global, unified Vestas style. In addition to this a completely new tone of voice and learning style in Vestas World was introduced. This tone of voice was peer-to-peer based and meant that Vestas World set a very high quality standard for the e-learning programs to live up to. The effect of this quality level has been that it shows the learners that Vestas put great emphasis on learning which has also had a positive effect on learning effectiveness. The learners have basically been more motivated.

Here’s a trailer for Vestas World. I hope it will inspire you to explore virtual worlds.

The D.School (at Stanford) Bootcamp Bootleg free download is a curated collection of material developed by teaching teams throughout the design world over the last five years. Inspiring, motivational, and easy to apply to real-world ID. Enjoy! (hat tip Venessa Miemis). Download here.