Web Technology Guide

Archive for December, 1969

In the perfect situation you’d have unlimited time and money available when creating a presentation, print document or online learning materials. You’d be able to call in whatever specialist expertise you wanted and have the time to wait while they delivered the goods. When it comes to the sourcing of visual aids, you would not hesitate to have a photographer carry out a photo shoot (even if this involved hiring models, booking studios, elaborate location shots and endless Photoshop manipulation of the results); you’d have no qualms about asking a graphic designer to put together complex Flash animations or an illustrator to do, well, illustrations.

I know that visuals are often used for the wrong reasons, typically as a form of decoration or as a way of filling a space. But in more cases than not, visuals are a necessary ingredient, because words alone just wouldn’t do the job. Visuals can explain what words can not and are much more likely to be remembered. But of course you can’t just use any old visual – it has to fit the purpose.

So, given you haven’t got the time and the money for specialist help, what can you do? Well, sometimes you can strike lucky and find exactly what you want on Google Images or in your organisation’s own image library (chance would be a fine thing); you could take your own photos or knock up a simple chart or diagram in a graphics programme. But in my experience that leaves an awful lot of gaps. That’s when I turn to clip art and stock photography.

There’s a lot of snobbery about this. Obviously the professionals discourage it, because it means less work for them, just like the live bands complained when discos first appeared. And there’s a lot of poor clip art and stock photography out there which is horribly cheesy and, worse still, over-used. But given all these provisos, I still have no hesitation in using it because (1) it has after all been created by professionals and (2) it often does the job just fine. It’s simply a case of being pragmatic and proportionate. What’s so wrong about that?

Back at Online Educa in Berlin last December, I made the decision to undertake a three month trial of Twitter. I must admit I didn’t really get it, but I was encouraged by the enthusiasm of Jane Hart, Josie Fraser and others, and decided to give it a go. Well, the three months are now up and it’s time to reflect on my experience. Do I continue or call it a day?

The stats show a reasonable amount of activity: I am following 107 others, 286 are following me and I have made 343 tweets, which works out at about 3 or 4 a day. In practice, some days I don’t tweet at all, on others I suddenly remember Twitter and issue a bombardment of tweets, and on those days when I’m able to keep online continuously, I approach what I imagine to be normal Twitter behaviour, i.e. occasional tweets throughout the day. I’ve discovered I need some tools, in my case Twhirl, a Twitter client for my PC, and Twibble, which does the same for my Nokia N series phone. Technically all this has worked fine and cost me nothing.

Typically those who don’t use Twitter find it hard to understand why anyone would want to tweet and what they would find to tweet about, and that’s quite understandable because tweeting is not normal human behaviour, at least not for me. Twitter itself suggests that you answer the question ‘what are you doing?’ in 140 characters or less, and that’s where most people start. This is a bit like a Facebook status posting so, like many people, I configured Facebook to pick up my tweets and display them on my profile page.

Sometimes what you are doing is interesting to other people, not because they need to know but because what you do gives away a great deal about what it’s like to be you. From the early days of Facebook, I have been fascinated by what people have for dinner, watch on TV, read in the bath, do at weekends, etc., just as much as I want to know what they’re up to professionally. You don’t get this information from a presentation, a report, even a blog, yet somehow it brings you much closer to the real person – you feel like friends, even if you’ve never met.

Once you have a relationship with your Twitter network, you can start to be a little more demanding. In my case that means asking questions – how do you do this? what is your experience of that? Replies come back in minutes and certainly much more quickly than you’d expect from a blog or forum posting, but you need quite a large network to maximise your chances of receiving useful responses.

Of course this works two ways and the old cliche that you only get out of anything what you are prepared to put in certainly applies here. When someone asks a question and you can contribute a useful answer then of course you must. And if you’ve found a gem of a website, blog posting, video or whatever then you should share it.

As a learning and development professional it is obligatory to ask whether Twitter has potential as a learning tool. I’m not sure. It doesn’t, for me at least, have the power that blogging does as a stimulus for reflection. It doesn’t offer the potential for collaborative work that a wiki can provide. Nor is it likely to be as helpful in locating and sharing expertise as an enterprise social networking tool. But I’m sure it can work alongside all these and other tools and I would certainly never discourage the use of Twitter in a learning context.

In summary, Twitter is providing me with plenty of value, so I’m sticking with it. As someone who works from home, it keeps me in touch with a wide range of like-minded professionals. Whether the benefits I’ve found are universal, I couldn’t possibly say. So, if you’re not already tweeting, then you’re going to have to find out the same way I did.

John Medina’s excellent book Brain Rules has received quite a bit of attention already (see my original post based on the videos and online information I explored first on John’s website, as well as Donald Clark’s recent review), but I’ve only just got round to reading it properly and I want to take a look at each of the twelve rules in a bit more detail. Whether I sustain this remains to be seen.

John is a developmental molecular biologist (whatever that means) and serious about distinguishing brain myths from brain facts, so I’ve got some confidence in his work. I’m not going to try and relay to you all John’s sources for his twelve rules, because it would take too long and you’d have no reason to buy the book, but I will pass on his conclusions and my reflections on why these may or may not be important in the context of workplace learning. So don’t argue with me if you disagree with the rules; on the other hand, do let me know if you have a different interpretation or application.

Rule 1: Exercise boosts brain power

You’ll have to get used to the fact that John’s rules aren’t really rules at all, they’re assertions. In my mind a rule is a statement that explains what to do in a particular situation – ‘if x happens, then do y’ – but let’s not get bogged down in semantics.

John argues that our brains were built for the way life was for us thousands of years ago – continually on the move, hunting and gathering, avoiding danger and seeking out opportunities. Early humans walked something like 12 miles a day (which meant they must have been pretty fit and needed a hell of a lot of calories), which meant they were conditioned to thinking as they went. Experiments show that thinking skills are improved by exercise, which stimulates the flow if blood to the brain. Even a modest amount of aerobic exercise will half your risk of general dementia and reduces the risk of Alzheimer’s by 60%.

So, what does rule 1 mean to me? Well, first of all, as someone who exercises frequently and must therefore be brilliant, this is a chance to be smug and look down my nose at those who have other pastimes. As John says, “Exercisers outperform couch potatoes in tests that measure long-term memory, reasoning, attention, problem-solving, even so-called ‘fluid intelligence’ tasks.”

But what it really tells me is that we have a problem if we expect learners to thrive sitting down for hours at a time in a classroom. This involves an unnatural amount of stillness and a dangerous absence of stimulation. It also shows how important it is not to compromise on physical activity in schools.

In the workplace, it would not go down well, particularly in tough times, if we took the afternoon off to play football, but there must be some compromise. I know some trainers use ‘energisers’ and many of these involve exercise, so I’d advocate more of those. Perhaps it would also help if the coffee machine and the toilets were some distance away, maybe 5 miles! More realistically, I’d schedule lots of breaks and encourage participants to take a walk. On residential courses I wouldn’t schedule evening work, instead encouraging people to use the gyms and other facilities.

Would I go so far as to have everyone walk round the room continuously during the sessions or sit on exercise bikes? I’d like to think I would, but hey, they’d think I was mad (and I can’t be – see above). What I do know is that exercise in moderation certainly gets my brain going, as I always get my best ideas on the cross-trainer and then have to rely on my short-term memory operating at peak performance as I try and hold on to all this while I wait for the opportunity to take a note. We need notepads or audio recorders on the gym machines. Could there be some money in that?

Rule 2: The human brain evolved too

In this chapter, John Medina explains how the brain has evolved over time. Much of this is not particularly relevant to learning, so I’m going to concentrate on one key element in this evolution – the development of symbolic reasoning:

“Symbolic reasoning is a uniquely human talent. It may have arisen from our need to understand one another’s intentions and motivations, allowing us to co-ordinate within a group.”

“The ability to peer inside somebody’s mental life and make predictions takes a tremendous amount of intelligence and, not surprisingly, brain activity.”

“We try to see our entire world in terms of motivations, ascribing motivations to our pets and even to inanimate objects.”

“Our ability to learn has deep roots in relationships. Our learning performance may be deeply affected by the emotional environment in which the learning takes place.”

“If someone does not feel safe with a teacher or boss, he or she may not be able to perform as well. If a student feels misunderstood because the teacher cannot connect with the way the student learns, the student may become isolated.”

The bottom line:

“Relationships matter when attempting to teach human beings.”

I suppose there’s nothing new in this idea. If we think back to all those individuals (teachers, parents, coaches, peers, managers, etc.) that have contributed greatly to our learning, there’s a good chance that we related well to these people and them to us. They may have challenged us to go further than we would have done on our own accord, but we respected them all the more for that. Those people who contrived to bully us, humiliate us, patronise us or otherwise make us feel bad, probably succeeded in putting us off the subject in question as well as them.

Given the choice, then we will almost certainly gravitate towards those people to whom we can relate well. Trouble is, we don’t always have the choice. In the workplace, we can get stuck with the wrong manager and this usually ends the same way – most people don’t leave their jobs, whatever they say at the exit interview, they divorce their managers! When it comes to the classroom, we typically get who we get and have to lump it. This puts a considerable onus on those who select and train teachers to make sure they do a good job.

To some extent the same applies if we learn collaboratively online. Without good facilitation/moderation, there is a risk of relationships breaking down, perhaps because one person tends to dominate or behave aggresively.

So, an alternative might be to avoid teachers altogether and concentrate on self-study – after all, we know learners like to learn at their own pace and in managable chunks. Leaving aside the fact that self-study may not be the ideal pedagogical choice, we’re unlikely to completely get round the relationship issue. In The Media Equation (Cambridge University Press, 1996), Reeves and Nass demonstrated that people treat computers, TV and new media like real people and places – if what they see or hear seems impolite or unfriendly, they turn off. Funnily enough, they blame this on the hardware, not the author, so designers can relax in the knowledge that they’re unlikely to receive hate mail.

My posting on Brain rules #1

The Brain Rules book

The Brain Rules website

The MASIE Center has just published an interesting survey on the use of social learning in the workplace. I’m not sure I go with the term ‘social learning’ because this is incredibly ambiguous – after all, a fair proportion of all learning involves the learner interacting with others – but let’s assume they mean the use of social media for learning and not get distracted. This was a self-selecting survey to which 1069 responded, ostensibly from ‘around the globe’, although I would predict a strong North American skew.

Respondents were asked which social media technologies they used in their organisations. Practically all the responses are interesting because they are, at least for me, unexpectedly high, even Twitter down at the bottom with 12%. Media sharing at 48%, wikis at 47%, blogs at 45%, social networks at 41%, content ratings at 13%. These are fascinating results, even allowing for the fact that respondents are self-selecting and that the question doesn’t specifically ask whether these media are used for learning. Even if you divide by four, you still have evidence of a significant trend in a hugely conservative profession.

Some 62% thought there was some or high value in social learning in their organisations. I’m not sure if this is positive or not, but I’ll take it as the former because I bet that a fair proportion of these installations flounder because they are poorly implemented or insufficiently integrated into everyday work.

When looking at barriers, by far the biggest obstacle identified was organisational culture, which is no surprise. Command and control doesn’t fit well with informal and collaborative learning approaches, and given the current crisis there’s even more command and control than usual to contend with. Chances are small organisations will find it easier.

Some 35% of respondents stated that they had a social learning project in place, i.e. a deliberate use of social media for learning, as opposed to emergence from the bottom-up. I’m not sure that it matters from which direction the impetus comes, but it would be nice if it was both.

Only 11% thought social learning was a fad, which is encouraging, although I’m not sure you can recognise something as a fad when it’s currently fashionable (as we found with sub-prime mortgages).

The question was asked ‘What percentage of your learning would you estimate could be done with a Social Learning format?’, which is rather awkwardly phrased and open to all sorts of misinterpretations, not to mention impossible to estimate. Anyway, respondents made a guess and the highest proportion guessed at 20-30%. That seems optimistic for social media in the short term, but far too low for social learning in its broadest sense.

I wouldn’t quote these figures with huge confidence, but I would be encouraged by the progress that’s being made. Thanks to the MASIE Center for getting this data together.

In Six Years in the Valley, The Economist describes how Silicon Valley is entering their second ‘nuclear winter’ of the 21st century. After the dotcom bust, we saw a revival centered on Web 2.0 services, typically provided free to the user, with the assumption that online advertising would eventually provide the revenue stream to ‘monetize’ the venture. Well it might have worked for Google, but now the recession is hitting hard, there’s nowhere near enough advertising revenue to go round. Silicon Valley stands on “ground that is as unstable, seismically and metaphorically, as it was in the earlier bust. The world economy is in crisis, advertising is collapsing and start-ups are once again vanishing into thin air.”

Typically, if something looks too good to be true, it probably is. Products and services can only be provided free of charge if someone other than the user is prepared to foot the bill. If advertising is not sought or is not available in sufficient quantities, it seems to me that there are only so many reasons why this situation might arise:

• The provider is the beneficiary of some form of grant, most likely through government, but perhaps from some charitable institution.
• The provider is treating the product as a ‘loss leader.’ They hope that a positive reaction to the product will boost their visibility and reputation, making it easier for them to sell other products and services.
• The provider offers an entry-level product, hoping to build an appetite for the product that can only be satisfied by a premium version or with the aid of add-on services, such as consultancy, support, training, hosting or adaptation of the product.
• The provider earns enough from other activities that they can afford to offer the product in question for free, perhaps simply because they believe in it. This argument also works at the level of those individuals who contribute their spare time freely, as a hobby or as a form of voluntary work.

We have got used to free content, free web 2.0 services and free software. We cannot assume that this situation will continue indefinitely and we may have to start dipping into our pockets to keep those services that we most value alive. After all, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

I have mixed feelings about classroom training. On the one hand, it frustrates me that the classroom is still the default format for a formal learning intervention, often chosen without regard for its suitability to the job in hand. On top of this, so much classroom training is poorly delivered, comprising little more than a technical presentation / knowledge dump, supported by tedious PowerPoint bullet-point slides.

On the other hand, even though my specialism is e-learning, I do myself regularly facilitate classroom workshops and am as sure as I can be that these make a difference – we achieve something that simply would not be possible online or asynchronously. True, I am much happier when the classroom element forms only a small part of the blend, but an important element none the less.

For this reason, I am pleased to see the results of the survey just released by the Training Foundation, in conjunction with the British Institute for Learning and Development (BILD). Now I must declare an interest here, in that I have in the past worked with the Training Foundation (an organisation that specialises in providing train-the-trainer services) in the development of their e-learning curriculum, although that is not the main subject of this study. The results show that classroom training (in this case teaching trainers how to deliver better classroom training) can make a lasting difference.

The survey was conducted online amongst learning and development professionals who had completed a TAP qualification (TAP is the branding that the Training Foundation uses for its train-the-trainer offering) between September 07 and January 09. Some 726 responded. Here’s what they found:

• The skills and techniques learned on the courses were put into practice on a routine basis by 97.6% of respondents. This is amazingly high when you consider that the average length of time between respondents finishing the course and participating in the survey was eight months, which is plenty of time for the learning to have evaporated or not to have proved useful.
• Some 97.4% said that learners provided better feedback when the TAP methodologies were applied by the respondents on their own courses. Now the TAP methodology is highly participative and reduces the role of the trainer as a presenter of information to an absolute minimum, so you can understand why this might have worked well.
• As many as 78% of respondents reported an increase in their own self-confidence.
• Practically all respondents advocated the TAP system strongly.

What this all tells me is that (1) it is possible to do a good job of classroom training and that (2) it is possible to teach others to do the same. If you’re going to use classroom training as part of the mix, then you may as well make a good job of it.

Cathy Moore is a champion of engaging, really effective e-learning. She pleads with us to dump the drone. When Cathy talks about design, you listen, because you know she practises what she preaches. That’s why, when Cathy recently announced the launch of her Elearning Blueprint, a performance support tool for designers, I was determined to take a close look.

According to Cathy, “the Blueprint is an interactive job aid that helps anyone design lean, lively elearning. It can be used by one person or an entire team—including subject matter experts. And because it’s based on Action Mapping, the Blueprint helps you create materials that improve business performance.”

You can explore the Blueprint using the guided tour, or you can try the first five or six pages of the product for real. What you’ll find is an engaging mix of tips, examples, interactive exercises, slide shows, videos and worksheets. The format – relatively long, scrolling web pages each containing a wide variety of activities and resources – works well for a performance support tool, and certainly saves on the endless ‘click to continue’ routine.

This is very much a practical and not a theoretical offering (although it draws on the latest research and does a good job of debunking myths) and is compact enough not to be overwhelming. I’d thoroughly recommend it.

See my Webcam Interview with Cathy Moore.

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Every brain is wired differently

In this chapter, John Medina explains how every brain is different from every other:

• “When you learn something, the wiring in your brain changes.”
• “What you do in life physically changes what your brain looks like.”
• “Our brains are so sensitive to external inputs that their physical wiring depends upon the culture in which they find themselves.”
• “Learning results in physical changes to the brain and these changes are unique to each individual.”
• “Students of the same age show a great deal of intellectual variability.”

So what are the implications of the fact that every student is different from every other and that every student takes something different from every learning experience? Here are John’s suggestions:

• To the extent that you’re committed to learning in groups, keep class sizes small, so teachers/trainers stand a better chance of understanding and reacting to the differences inherent in every student.
• When you hire teachers/trainers, use one of the established tests for detemining their empathetic ability, because this is so crucial to effective communication.
• Develop adaptive software that provides an individsualised learning experience that is well suited to the particular learner.
• For best results, combine adaptive teaching with adaptive software. John’s cites research carried out by Carol McDonald Connor which showed, when teaching reading skills, that a combination works better than the teaching or software used alone.

What does this mean for in the context of workplace learning when delivery is online? Here’s my take:

• Empathetic teaching is going to be inhibited by the fact that, unless webcams are being used, students are not visible to the trainer and therefore no body language cues are available. To compensate for this, the trainer needs to work hard to establish a climate of open communication, in which students can freely articulate their needs and provide feedback.
• We need to place a renewed emphasis on the development of adaptive, intelligent learning materials. Back in the 1980s, when artificial intelligence was in vogue, we saw some real progress being made in this area. By comparison, modern e-learning materials are prettier but dumber. You could argue that the best way to increase adaptability is to make the materials modular and to provide the student with the facility to determine their own progress, but this is only useful to the extent that the student knows what they know and what they need to know; novices require structure and support.

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