Jay Cross helps people work and live smarter. Jay is the Johnny Appleseed of informal learning. He wrote the book on it. He was the first person to use the term eLearning on the web. He has challenged conventional wisdom about how adults learn since designing the first business degree program offered by the University of Phoenix.
Internet Time Lab needed a logo for its iPhone app to measure emotion. At my partner’s suggestion, I turned to 99designs.com, “the fastest growing design marketplace in the world.” Their site says they’ve conducted 174,000 design contests and paid out $1.4 million to designers last month. I’d never heard of them.
Nine days ago, I posted a spec for what I wanted, put $149 on my credit card, and began receiving design options. 23 designers submitted a total of 62 entries. 3 withdrew their designs. 3 designers made my short list. I selected the winner last night.
Here’s the winning icon:
Look for it at Online Educa Berlin.
99designs also does brochures, web pages, t-shirts, banners, and book covers. I’ll be back.
Internet Time Lab needs an icon for its forthcoming mobile app. “Blips” records a person’s feelings at various times during the day and displays aggregate results on the web. The name Blips refers to the scant amount of time — a couple of Blips a day– it takes to increase one’s feelings of contentment and satisfaction.
I crowdsourced the design of the icon to 99Designs. I put up $149 and designers are submitting ideas. What do you think? If you feel strongly, leave a comment. Note that all entries are numbered.
Here’s the Web poll. If that doesn’t work, I’ve cut and pasted the contest pages below.
Thanks!
Dr Salas focuses on training that takes place away from the job. He’s looking in the wrong place. Most corporate learning takes place informally in the course of doing the job, not in training courses away from the job. These days, many organizations support what’s known as the 70-20-10 model that says 70% of learning is experiential, 20% guided by others (often managers and supervisors) and a mere 10% via formal instruction. Salas offers common sense advice on making the 10% work better. There’s a lot bigger bang for the buck in making the learning ecosystem supportive of learner-directed “pull” learning. The school system is one of the few institutions where lectures, courses conducted in artificial environments away from the context of what’s to be learned, and one-way “push” learning are the norm. Corporate learning has its flaws, to be sure, but they are minuscule when compared to the practices that are commonplace in schools and colleges. Most corporate trainers know more about learning theory than the grad students who lecture in colleges. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
Jurgen Appelo plays with more models of how things ought to work than anyone I else I know. His book Management 3.0 presents, assesses, and sometimes interconnects with agile, people-oriented processes relentlessly. I’m a fan. See his blog. And this presentation:
Cloud computing.
Some people think their credit card information and Amazon preferences are stored a mile overhead in a cumulus cloud. It’s not that mysterious.
Just think of the cloud as a humongous computer that is connected to endless warehouses of rack-mounted servers spread around the globe. Is it safe? Like walking across the street in Manhattan, it’s perfectly safe if you know what you are doing. You don’t need to see inside the cloud. All that’s required is faith when you put things in, they will emerge where and how you want them to.
Four years ago at the Expo 2.0 conference, I was among those asked “What is cloud computing?”
“At the Web 2.0 Expo, we asked Tim O’Reilly, Dan Farber, Matt Mullenweg, Jay Cross, Brian Solis, Kevin Marks, Steve Gillmor, Jeremy Tanner, Maggie Fox, Tom McGovern, Sam Lawrence, Stowe Boyd, David Tebbutt, Dave McClure, Chris Carfi, Vamshi Krishna and Rod Boothby the same question: What is Cloud Computing?“
Looking back, things haven’t changed. Millions of words later, the cloud is what it always was.
To my amazement, 332,156 people have watched the video.
My broadest exposure on the net is a minute-long comment I made four years ago.
#itashare
The largest obstacle holding L&D professionals back from taking advantage of network technologies, distributed networks, social connections, peer interaction, and informal learning may be their bedrock belief that learning = courses.
What’s a course? Where did courses come from?
The word course derives from twelfth-century French for running or moving forward. Over time, it morphed into meaning the circuit that was being run on, as in racecourse. In the fourteen century, academics started using the term to mean a planned series of study. Today, a course is a standard unit of measure of learning. Vendors sell training by the course. Students complete certain courses to earn a degree.
Courses are usually formal, in that the curriculum is defined by an outside authority. Courses are usually delivered in the same format regardless of the difficulty or breadth of the content, as for instance the 50-minute classes we endured in school and college. A cut-off score on a test supposedly verifies that the course’s lessons were learned.
Some people erroneously equate courses and learning. You need to learn something, you better take a course.
In point of fact, very little adult learning occurs in courses. People learn from experience, from solving problems, from asking questions, from mimicking others, and from trying various things until they hit upon the thing that works for them. Most adults studiously avoid taking courses. They resent them.
Few experienced people in business can dedicate a full hour to anything, particularly if they only want to learn two minutes of information embedded somewhere in the middle of a fifty-minute course. They have their own agendas; they have work to do. They lack the patience to wade through recitations of what they already know and lessons on things they don’t deem relevant to their work. They know what they want to know and that’s all they’re motivated to learn. It’s like walking into a discount superstore to buy a bag of licorice and finding the only size of licorice they sell is the three gallon 24-pack. It’s often easier to just go without.
In the past, I’ve sounded a wake-up call that most learning does not take place in courses. If that’s all we’re offering, we aren’t serving our internal customers. When this message fell on deaf ears, I wrote that courses are dead. I think I underplayed the message. Actually, courses are a ticking time bomb. If courses are the only way you enable experienced workers to learn what they need to know in order to excel, you’re not fulfilling your professional responsibilities. Tech-savvy hactivists are replacing the passive and obedient older workforce we’ve been accustomed to. Real soon now, you’ll be confronted with workers who are mad as hell and aren’t going to take it any more. If you don’t hack the system, they will.
Courses are boxes, and everyone but the new kids on the block believes it’s good to think outside of the box.
Are you up for a challenge?
Join me next week for a simple game.
Set-up and rules:
First, load up on the spirit of social, informal, experiential, network-assisted learning by attending Harold and Jane’s workshops, listening to Clark or Charles’ presentations, reading our blogs and books, and/or drinking the Social Business zeitgeist from Fast Company, Andy McAfee, Working Smarter Daily, or McKinsey & Co.
Next, seat four to six people around a poker table or small conference table. At least half the players should be trainers, instructional designers, or HR professionals.
Players stack 4 quarters in front of their place at the table.
The dealer/convener opens a conversation about how workers or managers in their company could more effectively learn a particular skill. The conversation may ramble into talk of incentives and measurement, but players should guide it back to the theme of how employees can get better at that particular skill. The objective is to avoid the language of top-down courses and formal learning.
Players make suggestions one to three paragraphs in length, one after another, beginning with the player to the left of the dealer. It’s fair to build on one another’s ideas. The talking stick passes counter-clockwise at the end of each turn.
A player who says “COURSE” or “INSTRUCTOR” or “TEACHER” or “TEST” or “GRADES” puts a quarter in the pot for each occurrence.
Players with competitive natures usually wait until a person has said their three paragraphs, hoping they’ll blurt out several of the forbidden terms in one turn (which will cost them several quarters).
Play continues until only one person still has quarters; that person takes the pot.
Let’s see if you can prescribe a learning solution without resorting to the controlling world of courses.
Join me next week on Google+. I’ll deal. Up to ten of us can play. We’ll webcast the event.
Email me in advance at jaycross@internettime.com, subject: game. Google+, our gaming platform, works best when I invite participants in advance by email.
Time: 10 am Pacific time, Wednesday, August 15th. I’m +jaycross on Google+. If you haven’t used G+ yet, download the app in advance and set it up. This is not rocket science but you’ll miss the beginning of the game if you wait until the last minute. If you haven’t tried Google+, well, you should.
Bomb image by mcol, courtesy Open Clip Art Library
Ideas from Jane Hart’s online chat on June 4 in the Social Learning Centre.
Q1) Harold in his blog post says ”For too long our organizations have suffered from the disease of complication. It’s time to simplify.” Let’s look at how we can simplify learning solutions. How can we help people keep up to date with what’s happening INSIDE their organisation – in simple ways?
Most of the three dozen people convened by the irrepressible Aaron Silvers for a recent retreat in Sedona, Arizona, would say they’re designers, but not instructional designers. We’re software nerds, change agents, standards developers, experience designers, game developers, and problem solvers. We came together at Up to All of Us to compare notes, find connections, and share the tools of our craft.
Sedona is a magic spot in the high desert, about two hours north of Phoenix. Kurt Hanks led a two-day workshop on Paradigm Mapping before the official two-day event kicked off. The following two days were peppered with short sessions on design techniques and concepts that we then applied to projects we were working on.
You don’t hear about tools like these at ASTD meetings and traditional training gatherings. At UTAOU, we were more into developing platforms than programs. We focused more on performance and less on training.
Mindmapping. My colleague Clark Quinn mindmapped the main event. Mindmaps are excellent for visualizing relationships.
Visual Language. Dave Gray inspired us to Just Draw It. This is vital. We were all sketching like mad throughout the weekend. Anyone can draw. JFDI. It will open your mind. And help you open other people’s minds.
Personas. Picture your users. Empathize with them. Respect them. What are their motives? Their likes? Tell stories about them. Especially important for engineers (because “they don’t get empathy.”)
Learner Experience Design. Envision cascades of resources, activities, artifacts, and reflections.
Bodystorming. Physically act out a situation to understand it. Do a skit. First person. People can represent systems or objects. We modeled a stranded passenger dealing with an airline’s telephone customer support, both real and how it might be.
Gamestorming. “Knowledge games are models of business scenarios, environments and interactions. Games not only model systems, but at the same time they allow the players to experience those systems from within, just as customers do. People participate in games because they want to, not because they have to or because someone told them to – just like real customers.”
Cognitive Apprenticeship. Nearly a quarter century ago, this seminal paper outlined what it takes to make apprenticeship work in the knowledge era:
• identify the processes of the task and make them visible to students;
• situate abstract tasks in authentic contexts, so that students understand the relevance of the work; and
• vary the diversity of situations and articulate the common aspects so that students can transfer what they learn
Improv. Be fast, not right. No negatives (Yes, and…) We did word games. We fenced with our hands. We did living sculpture. Loosen up. Let go of restraint.
Journey Mapping (AKA Experience Mapping). We did this following bodystorming. Breaking an experience down into AEIOU steps enables you to suspect judgment and shape the change conversation. (AEIOU = Activity, Environment, Interaction, Objects, Users).
Rapid Prototyping. Make a model. It can be paper or 3×5 cards. Leave it messy. Use it once and toss it.
Storyboarding. Tell your story visually. Co-create it. Make it tangible.
Sand table. Someone suggested letting people model scenarios with puzzle pieces purchased at garage sales. (I keep a bunch of toys, games, and magic tricks handy at the Internet Time Lab.)
Value proposition. For __________ who _________ we deliver __________ with _________ that __________.
For (customer) who (motivation) we deliver (service) with (detail) that (benefits). Make sure you have one that’s crisp. Similar to the Elevator Pitch.
70:20:10. In the workplace, 70% of learning is experiential, 20% comes from interactions with others like coaches and mentors, and 10% is formal.
Business model canvas. From Osterwalder’s Business Model Generation.
These additional design techniques and frameworks popped up in private conversations:
Story Borrowing. Tell other’s stories as if they were yours.
Shadowing. Follow the customer.
Self-actualizing organizations, meta coaching, international coaching federation, mindlines
Marketing Metaphoria, Zaltman
One of my two main objectives in attending UTAOU was to rekindle my use of design thinking. I love to draw and doodle and design things, yet left to my own devices, I revert all too easily to text. Now I’m back in drawing mode and I hope to stay on that plane. If only it were easier to scribble in blog posts!
My other objective was to advance my thinking about converting today’s dysfunctional corporations into tomorrow’s lithe value-creating organisms. I’m throwing the design tools at the dilemma. My fingers are crossed.
West Coast Wikiconference 2011
WikiPedia turned 10 years old today. I attended a delightful unconference with a hundred Wikipedians at the Hub in San Francisco.
How’s this for a deal? $25 paid for breakfast, lunch, a full day’s events, presentations by Ward Cunningham and Kevin Kelly, and even a celebratory t-shirt.
Hundred of events like this are taking place around the world.
It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely success story than Wikipedia. From the Welcome to Wikipedia booklet:
Eugene & Ward
Ward is also a leader in the Agile Software movement and the thought leader in Software Patterns.
We discovered a common interest in learning from pictures and video. Periodically his company’s software staff gets together for a day-long retreat. Quarterly was not frequent enough, so they invented “micro-quarters,” of which there are six a year. At the conclusion of each retreat, people draw pictures of what they’ve accomplished. With the camera on his laptop, Ward takes a video of each individual explaining his or her picture. He edits out the ums and ahs to prepare a fast-moving video documenting the event. People use these to review the event and check on progress when the next micro-quarter rolls around.
Ward’s original wiki was geeky beyond belief. It relied on CamelCase and oddball formatting conventions. It was not pretty. I mentioned that ten years ago, my glossary defined wiki as “a way to stop a conversation.” So I asked Ward how he felt about today’s spiffed-up, user-friendly wikis. He told me that a few days after he released the first wiki, another developer had hacked out a different version. Didn’t ask permission or anything. Ward thought about it and decided that was okay. He was happy to contribute the wiki to the public good. I’ll cover the content of Ward’s presentation in another post.
Eugene Kim introduced the open space session masterfully, getting the participants to explain the rules of open space. Whatever happens is what is supposed to happen. If it’s not beneficial, move on.
The first breakout I attended dealt with getting new people to create and edit posts. Many people approach Wikipedia who don’t realize they can edit the content. More fundamentally, they don’t see themselves as editors. I called up the Wikipedia home page on my iPad. It’s totally intimidating. There’s no on-ramp for new users. When I brought up instructional design, forty faces went blank. I suggested putting together a few simple videos showing a user explaining what’s going on. Some people liked the idea, but some Wikipedia foundation people began explaining how hard it was to change the front page. (There’s enormous perceived resistance to change by the elite contributors.) Did I know how tough it is to make changes when hundreds of millions of people were involved?
This evening I discovered that there are already dozens of “how to edit” articles on YouTube. Maybe someone can convince Wikipedia to point to them.
In another breakout, Gordon Mohr encouraged us to explore how to make Wikipedia “Broader, deeper, and edgier.” This may have to take place outside of the Wikipedia framework. We touched on many topics. Some new articles would be better positioned as “not ready” rather than “not good enough.” Wikipedia would feel less exclusionary without the distinction made between members and outsiders. Why not consider all users members — and therefore editors? It occurred to me that Wikipedia has scant room for discussion. It’s still just an encyclopedia; it might be better by adding commentary and a forum for discussion.
Another breakout discussed Wikipedia – the next ten years. What should evolve?
I wanted to be able to walk around in the knowledge space, sort of the Library of Alexandria meets Second Life.
I also pushed my current passion, the workscape. Why not give readers the option of checking a box that would prompt periodic reinforcement? Battle the forgetting curve with brief, spaced reminders built right into the system. One of the old hands said you could already do this. All it took was remembering what pages you’d viewed and revisiting them. Another Wikipedia said c’mon, nobody’s going to do that; they won’t even remember what pages they’d visited. I don’t sense the group was very interested in people learning things beyond their initial exposure. If you have encyclopedia DNA, it’s hard to think outside of the encyclopedia box.
Toward the end of the day, Kevin Kelly gave a closing presentation on What Technology Wants, his new book. I’d heard Kevin’s pitch two months ago in Berkeley and departed in confusion. I’ll detail today’s version in another post.
Welcome to Jay’s hangout on the web! There’s a lot underneath the hood here. I’ve been blogging more than a dozen years. Go to “coordinates” for a list of what to check out and how to get in touch. Don’t miss the Important Stuff collection.
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