Wheat and Chaff

The other day I decided to replace a leaking saddle valve that is used to divert water to my central humidifier (a device I had never even heard of before I moved to this arid clime). Replacing a saddle valve is a simple task, and when I completed it - without use of instructions - I opened the valve only to discover that the new one leaked worse than the old.

So what did I do? I went online. I Googled my way to two or three websites that had instructions for installing a saddle valve. All three of them focused on new installations rather than replacement, and none of them addressed my specific problem.

Next stop: YouTube. Sure enough, my very first hit was a video discussing how to install a saddle valve. Along the way the host described every part involved, and why that part is important. Although he didn't talk about leaking valves specifically, his explanation and demonstration of the brass insert and plastic compression ring made me realize that my problem very likely lies with the compression ring in the valve I purchased. In short, this video was by far the most useful resource I found.

When I finished watching the video I looked over at some of the related videos that YouTube had selected for me. A lot of junk, to be sure, but the fact remains that I found the useful content first. That's part of the beauty of YouTube - there is a small amount of very useful content intermingled with a lot of less-than-useful stuff, but the valuable content always rises to the top. The process of rating content enables everyone to find the useful content they need while still making the purely entertaining content readily available as well.

There is a lesson here. As a site's volume of content grows, having a rating system becomes increasingly important for helping the users separate the wheat from the chaff.

Oh, the Enthusiasm

I had a project team meeting today with the Web 2.0/social learning project team. Only one other person showed up to the meeting. It boggles my mind that people aren't more interested and excited by this initiative. I mean, how can you not be? Like it or not, folks, this is the direction that corporate learning is headed.

On a more positive note, I created a wiki today. Nothing fancy, just a place to document procedures for preparing CBT content for ingestion into the LMS. What was most exciting about it was that one of my co-workers has already added to it. That is a positive step.

So much to read...

Over the course of the past week I have generated a list of books to read, blogs to follow, and websites to pay attention to. Some of these I have already been keeping an eye on, but my experience at DevLearn last week made me realize that there is a lot more I should be doing. So today I'm ordering books, subscribing to RSS feeds, and bookmarking websites. Over the next few days I am going to begin working myself into a routine of becoming increasingly participatory in several communities. Though contrary to my introverted nature, this, I believe, is the path to eLearning 2.0 Zen.

DevLearn08 Addendums

I'm sitting here in the San Jose airport reviewing my blog, and a couple of things jumped out at me for updates or additional thought.

Item One: the ladies I had lunch with yesterday who work for the State of California. Yesterday when I was talking with them they seemed like they were focused on topics such as rapid e-learning development, and creating high-impact learning. Yesterday afternoon I saw one of them show up in a Web 2.0/ eLearning 2.0 session I was in, and this morning one sat through the Training in Action informal learning seminar I was at. I wonder if their focus is changing a little now.

Yesterday when I was posting I wondered why IBM used a custom tool for getting learners enrolled in an entire curriculum of courses rather than using their Saba LMS. It occurred to me today that it's probably because so many of their learning objects exist outside of the LMS. A custom tool would allow them to produce a list of all learning objects a person should partake of, whereas the LMS could really only sign them up for things that are within the LMS.

Time to start boarding the plane. More later, I suppose.

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.

DevLearn08 - Day 3

I'm in a Breakfast Bytes session already, and I can tell it's not going to be a good one. The content sounds like it might be useful, but most of the people in the group are talking in such quiet voices that I can only make out half of what they're saying. A lot of others have already tuned out because they're having the same issue hearing.

Okay, so we convinced everyone to speak up. The leader of this discussion made the point that one of the best ways to get people to start using Web 2.0 tools is to just start using them yourself for your daily work. For example, instead of creating a Word document and passing it around, create a wiki and point people to it. It occurs to me that we could use blogs for project status updates the same way we use the project tracking spreadsheet for our weekly team meetings.

A good point he made is that information doesn't just need to be searchable, it needs to be findable. If you can't find a piece of information, then what good is that information? That makes the case for tags. If we can get our hands on a tool that uses tags and has the option to search tags without searching content, we'll put ourselves in a good position to have findable content.

So that breakfast discussion ended up being a little more basic than I had hoped for, but that's generally been the trend here. Still, the discussion did prompt a few thoughts and I took a couple notes on things to check out later. The discussion leader is from Portland, and involved in the local ASTD chapter there. He and I probably know a few of the same people.

Today's keynote speaker at the general session is John Medina, author of Brain Rules. Holy crap, this guy talks fast.

Sounds like he's going to talk about short- and long-term memory and exercise and learning. Not sure how those last two are related, but I'm sure I'll found out.

One of the theories about short-term memory is that we have a "memory buffer" that they call immediate memory where things that we have just seen are stored briefly. The human brain can store seven pieces of information (plus or minus 2) in that immediate memory for 30 seconds. If you don't repeat it, you lose it. If you do repeat it, it enters working memory. Once that information enters working memory, you have it for up to 120 minutes. The number of things you can store in working memory, and the amount of time you can store them varies widely from person to person. He told an interesting story about working memory and a professional chess player which I won't repeat here, but am not likely to forget.

As for long-term memory, one point he made is that it takes ten years of periodic repetition before your brain will have a piece of information permanently stored. At that point you will never forget it. An example he gave was the lyrics to "Stairway to Heaven."

What happens during that ten years is something we do not understand. To wit, scientists refer to this stage of memory as the "nomadic phase." The memory wanders around in your brain somewhere, but they don't know what it does or where it's stored. During this time, however, that memory can be altered or amended, which means it can be corrected or corrupted. Still, it does have to be periodically repeated or you will not retain it permanently. That makes the case for continuing to do math all the way through high school. Don't want your kids to forget their times tables, do you?

I just noticed that Dr. Medina's presentation is done in Director, and he's actually playing it in Director. Wacky.

The relationship between exercise and learning is this: regular and moderate exercise stimulates brain function, making it easier for your brain to pass information from immediate memory to working memory, and from working memory into nomadic memory. They tested this with a control group, and found that with aerobic exercise (and only aerobic exercise, anaerobic exercise doesn't work) executive brain function (memory) improved by 120%. Another study determined that regular aerobic exercise has a nearly identical effect on depression to Zoloft.

More interesting: they've discovered that the rate of learning is highest during the cool down period after exercise. Jason, if you're reading this, I need a stationary bike installed at my desk.

DevLearn08 - Day 2 (cont.)

Third and final session of the day: "Maximizing Social Networking to Foster Sustained Employee Collaboration" with Mark Sylvester.

The first thing Mark wants to talk about is why organizations want to implement social networks. He has three reasons: to take advantage of informal learning, to help employees find experts, to help students find study partners, and to help people find mentors. (Wait, that's four reasons.) Organizations may choose to focus on one, some, or all of these.

He is saying that organizations who implement social networks without a plan for what they're going to do with it are much more likely to fail. I've heard this before, and it's a point I am continually driving home because it just makes sense.

Mark has examples of several of the social network sites that his company has put together for their clients. I'm already starting to wonder how useful this will be for me if this is the level his presentation is going to be at, but I'm hopeful that I will still find some value here. On the other hand, it's always useful to see what other organizations are doing.

His software has a really cool feature that helps you locate people with similar interests, areas of expertise, etc. It's very intuitive and visually impressive. And yet, it doesn't look particularly useful for AAA NCNU because we need so much more.

Wow. A lot of people have gotten up and walked out of this session. Not something I have seen at any previous session. I suspect that has a lot to do with the fact that he has basically spent the entire presentation marketing his tool. If he wanted to demonstrate some of the basic key features of a social networking tool, he probably should have used somebody else's tool.

Ah, here we go. Back on his original topic again. He wants to talk about design goals for your community, and making sure that you design the community in such a way that your users want to use it.

Boy, he uses a lot of cocktail party analogies.

He just suggested reading the book Groundswell, making him the third speaker to recommend it in the last two days. I also heard about it from a speaker at a webinar about a month ago. Guess I should read it, eh?

Now it's time to find something to do for the evening.