DevLearn08 - Day 3 (cont.)

For today I have elected to attend the Technology in Action seminar. This will take up the rest of the day, with the topic being "Optimizing Informal Learning." Apparently this is being broadcast online simultaneously. They have four presenters, and I can see Anders Gronstedt among them. That means we'll be talking about Second Life for at least part of this session.

Ooh, they have those remote audience voting thingies (that's a technical term), and we're actually using them. They asked several questions about what people are doing with informal learning systems, but they didn't provide any context to that by asking how many people actually have informal learning systems in the first place.

One of the questions in their poll was asking to what extent people assess informal learning. Bryan Chapman then asked (which I think is a very pertinent question), if you assess informal learning, is it still informal? At what point does it cross over to formal learning?

The first speaker is from Sun Microsystems. He clearly has a lot of passion and knowledge around this topic. Nothing new yet, but one thing he showed us is a tool Sun has that is somewhat similar in concept to what IBM uses for helping employees find learning objects that would be useful to them. One key difference is that Sun's is focused entirely on learning (they even call it MyLearning), whereas IBM puts theirs right on the employee's intranet homepage.

They have wikis, blogs, user-created videos, and etc. One person asked how Sun drove user adoption. His response was that they didn't have to because their employees already were using these tools outside the company. At a technology company that may very well be true, but that is not a scenario we can expect at AAA NCNU.

They have a certification process they use to annoint certain people with the capability to create and modify content on topics within their area of expertise. This allows anyone with subject matter expertise and some development skill to produce learning objects without having to go to the training department. It also allows the training department to have some control over who is creating what.

The next speaker is from Pfizer. Apparently their informal learning platform got started when an IT person installed MediaWiki on a company server one day, and just started using it. MediaWiki is not the most user-friendly of wiki applications, so they created a series of short video tutorials that visitors to "Pfizerpedia" have immediate access to. I am interested in doing something similar for our eLearning 2.0 platform.

This speaker is presenting remotely, and apparently has some pretty serious network traffic issues going on because the audio is cutting out badly. Very badly. And she has her cell phone ringing, and her dog barking. It's gotten to the point where the session facilitator (Bryan Chapman) has had to cut off her presentation and take over.

At this point the only key information point left was that Pfizer uses a content approval system for everything that is submitted to Pfizerpedia. I don't think that's a good idea, personally. Having content approval for some things is crucial, but there are likely countless topics that are not sensitive enough to require that step. It would seem to me that if users had to go through a content approval step every time they wanted to post something, they would be less willing to create content because of the hassle.

I just checked the weather report. Looks like it's likely to be snowing when I get home. Yippee.

Speaker three is from the Peace Corps. Not an organization I would have expected to have a significant informal learning presence, but apparently they do. Now I see why: the Act of Congress that created the Peace Corps says that no U.S. employee can work for the Peace Corps for more than five years, and their volunteers only serve for two years.

At first glance their informal learning tool appears to be more of a portal that people use to find learning objects. The learning objects themselves look like they are static documents - no collaboration at all. Some of the documents that I could see were about things like how to write learning objectives or the instructional design review process. While I agree wholeheartedly that this type of documentation can be valuable as a learning object available to many people, it seems like there are a lot of missed opportunities. He did say that their original plan for this portal had been much more grandiose, and so maybe this was the best they could do to start with given their particular challenges with turnover and resources.

The value in their tool is that it makes documentation and learning objects easier to find and more accessible to all staff. There is also a component that allows people to provide feedback on the content stored within.

Anders Gronstedt is up next. Judging by his first slide, it looks like he is going to give the same presentation I have already seen two or three times before at various webinars. Anders lives in Boulder.

Anders is starting off with a very animated rant against conference calls and webinars. By far the most animated and vigorous I have ever heard from him.

DevLearn08 apparently has its own island in Second Life; guess I'll have to check it out later. It was created by a guy from Countrywide.

His presentation has turned out to be different from the others I have seen him give, which is good. No new information yet, but considering the amount of research I put into using Second Life for training earlier this year I certainly wasn't expecting new information from this presentation.

He is downplaying the cost of using Second Life within an organization. Second Life is free to acquire and use, that part is true. However, getting your own space to work with and building up your island does have some costs involved. If your organization doesn't have the technical expertise to design and build content in Second Life, you are looking at tens of thousands of dollars for someone else to build what you want. If you do have the technical expertise, then you're looking at probably thousands of hours of development time. On the other hand, for a large company with geographically spread out staff that investment is probably well worthwhile. Just ask IBM.

And that draws DevLearn 2008 to a close. Time to print my boarding pass, get some lunch, and get on a plane.