One of their latest efforts is Google Wave. This thing seems to be a virtual collaboration mecca. There’s a real blurring of the line between synchronous (real-time) and asynchronous communication. It’s email, discussion boards, chat, Twitter, and Instant Messaging all mushed together in one easy package. If you’re looking to move away from email (and IMO, you should), this is the place to go. It’s very hard to follow an email conversation, for example – especially if you’re not in on the discussion from the start. It’s just impossible in IMs and chats. The playback feature in Wave takes care of that problem nicely. The ability to mix private and public conversations without cheating either of them is perfect. Everything stays in context and yet only the intended people see what you want them to see. Those are just the tip of the iceberg in what this can do.

Take a look at the abridged version of the demo Google gave. The original demo is 80 minutes long… I don’t have that kind of time at the moment, so this 10 minute version is perfect.

That goes by pretty fast, doesn’t it. I imagine the 80 minute version would be slightly easier to follow, but at 1/8th of the time commitment I’m satisfied with what I get here.

So what do you think? For a distributed group of people working on a project, this seems like the perfect answer to me. Let’s say you have a flowchart you’re creating for a new process. You could have one person create it an circulate it in email for comments and then make changes and circulate it again. Or you could use Google Docs and all make changes directly in the document in real-time. Or you could use Google Wave and edit and discuss the changes in context, publicly or privately, and have a history to refer back to, and be able to pull new people in at any time without worrying about how they’ll get up to speed.

How about for a distance training curriculum, where everyone needs to review and discuss a topic every month? Or as a support channel that becomes its own knowledge management system, or feeds into a separate one?

It’s full of possibility.

That said, it’s not the be-all-and-end-all. If you need a bit more control over your environment – prescribing a learning path for someone rather than letting them find their own path, for example – this may not do what you need. It also looks like it could overwhelm some users with its rich features – this would take more training to use than email, for some people. But if you work (or play) in a collaborative environment with even moderately computer literate people, you could probably make great use of this Wave.

As a result of these and many other pressures, what you end up with is an instructional designer doing their best to meet the business demands of a short development time and short delivery time, and in the process having to forgo an engaging, effective delivery for a lowest common denominator approach that presents the material in a linear, lecture (or straight text, online) format with very little for the student to do to practice the materials. Frequently the “assessments” are also dumbed-down to the point of being just a few simple True/False questions. And thus we have training that meets the business owners’ expectation – a waste of time that provides a check mark.

So to me, it’s both thrilling and frustrating to read things like this part of an interview with J. Mark Bertrand, author of Rethinking Worldview: Learning to Think, Live, and Speak in This World.

CPYU: What are some of the toughest challenges that you have faced when teaching teenagers today? Have you noticed any changes since you started teaching teens?

JMB: I don’t talk to teens any differently than I would an adult audience. I made a decision when I started that I’d never talk down to my students. I’d let the hard questions stay hard—in fact, I’d make them harder if need be. It seems to have worked. Teens are much more sophisticated than they are experienced. Before they’ll listen to your experience, they have to believe in your sophistication. You have to prove it isn’t ignorance that motivates you, but knowledge.

The most challenging aspect of teens is what they have in common with the rest of us. As comfortable middle-class North Americans, we enter a classroom expecting to be pandered to. We look at knowledge the way a consumer views a product. We expect to be entertained, emotionally engaged, and ultimately affirmed in their starting assumptions.

Everything he’s saying here is valid for most adults. They do generally enter a classroom (or an online course) expecting to spend some time being somewhat entertained, but ultimately not come out with any new information. I don’t think that’s what they hope for, deep down, but that’s what they’ve generally gotten (and not just from training sources, but from everywhere – media, church, school, books…), and they’ve learned to expect it. They’ve learned that they will be spoon-fed, and not challenged.

Since we all grew up watching television instead of reading and talking about books, many [of] the discursive skills that go hand in hand with literacy are on the wane. Teens might actually have it a little better than their parents, since the Internet has at least fostered an abridged form of literacy, but being able to read a passage and immediately get the gist of it seems to be a specialized skill these days, which is troubling in a text-oriented community like the church.

I’d add that that applies equally well to online training developers. An example has to be incredibly simplified in many cases just to ensure that the point gets across, but the trouble is that it gets so watered down that it is divorced from reality and loses its relevance.

As someone involved the corporate training business, I would love to follow this author’s lead and present challenging, thought-provoking learning opportunities for our employees. The deck is severely stacked against a corporate training department in doing that, but it is a battle worth fighting. Judging from all the point-and-click, read-and-respond training I’ve seen (and, unfortunately, developed) out there we seem, as an industry, to be losing that battle. Many of us have given up the fight, and are now little more than order-takers – not because we want to be, but because we’ve been so beaten down.

And that’s possibly the most frustrating thing about working in corporate training – knowing we can do it better, but not being allowed.

Everything about this recording is interesting to me:

• From a technology standpoint, what he has achieved and set in motion
• From a teaching standpoint, how he delivered the lecture – the design, “tech elements”, and presentation style
• From an emotional standpoint, how he pulls it together in the end. Absolutely perfect.
• From a personal standpoint, how he comes across as completely genuine and open. Someone you’d really like to get to know.

I never met the guy or heard of him before, but he is now one of the most impressive people I’m aware of.

Randy died yesterday, succumbing to the illness that informed his lecture and made it so poignant. It seems fitting to bring the lecture back again for those who may have missed it.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=3115188410730134929" width="400" height="326" wmode="transparent" /]

Another piece of his legacy is the groundbreaking “Alice” programming instructional tool. I wrote more detail about that in a previous post. The genius of it is that it entices kids (even more specifically, girls, an under-served demographic in that area) to learn how to program by introducing story-telling and fun into the learning process.

Take a few minutes to watch the lecture. It’s worth the investment. If you’re pressed for time, I have links to shorter versions on the original post – but I do encourage watching the longer version if you can.

So my profile sat there. I checked in on it every once in a while, connected with a couple online acquaintances and colleagues, and looked at some of the applications to see if anything struck me as useful. Every once in a while I’d see something intriguing, but nothing that I wanted to spend much time with.

Connecting with a few friends from church spurred some activity. It was fun to learn a little more about their lives as they chose to summarize it in their profiles. But for the most part, I spent my free time on other projects.

Then Walt showed up.

Walt led the church youth group I was in during high school. He also has an amazing talent for keeping in touch with people. When he created the Facebook group for our old youth group members (and yes, I mean old… it’s been 20+ years, sadly), I joined. By the end of that week, I was catching up with 25 people I haven’t seen in 20 years. Then the photos showed up. Photos like this one (those are approximately 20 marshmallows in each mouth):

I haven’t laughed this hard in a long time. I’m talking to people I haven’t seen in decades, and it’s like I just spoke to them yesterday; we’re picking up right where we left off. The group is continuing to grow.

Now I have a problem. I’m spending all my time on Facebook. I’m constantly checking to see who else has joined, or what photos have been uploaded, or what comments people are making. It’s getting out of hand. I gotta step away, or I’m not going to get anything else done. The lawn’s not going to mow itself!

It’s a lot of fun, though. This is a group of people I genuinely care about and have missed (as opposed to almost everyone else I knew in high school).

Hey, Walt… thanks for the new addiction. I sincerely appreciate it. My wife would like to thank you, too… next time you see her, guard your shins.

What is the Scope of our Responsibility as Learning Professionals?

That’s the question of the month, and it’s clarified a bit in the above linked post:

• Do educational institutions and corporate learning & development departments have responsibility for supporting Long Tail Learning? Do they have responsibility for learning beyond what can be delivered through instruction? If so, what is their responsibility? Where is the edge of responsibility?
• Similarly, does the instructor have a responsibility to help students make sense of or deal with content he or she did not teach the students? In other words, if a student finds information on the Internet or some other place, how much time and attention should the instructor allow for the discussion of such content? Should it be discussed at all if it is non-conventional or generally thought of as not credible or contradicts the instructor? Who determines credible research? Is all non-referred research questionable?

I’m taking “Long Tail Learning” as meeting the ever expanding niche development needs of ever smaller populations in an organization. For most organizations, the training department is stretched pretty thin and has to concentrate on those development needs that either meet the needs of the largest populations or have the biggest impact on either costs or sales (that’s currently where the line of responsibility is set for most organizations). That means some departments are on their own for development needs – sometimes even their most important needs – because the training department doesn’t have the bandwidth to help. Then you’ve got the training topics that fit into that large group, but have variations for each sub-group within the larger population. Where does the training department’s responsibility fall for these groups? How do you design (and should you design) training that covers those needs?

Ideally, obviously, the answer is that in a perfect world the training department would be able to support the learning needs of everyone in the organization at all times. So I’m taking that as my starting point. Ideally, everything an employee needs to know in an organization, from literacy to how to run a business unit, would be the responsibility of the training department.

Realistically, that’s not going to happen, but that would be my ideal goal.

Now, we need to consider what “responsible” means. To some that might mean the training department directly owns and delivers all the content. That’s not what I mean. I mean that the training department is responsible for enabling the acquisition of knowledge, skills, and abilities through any and all means necessary. That could be as simple as making sure an authoritative source for a given topic is available to someone – a book, a website, a mentor, a trainer, a vendor, etc. – to as complex as training a person or persons to be that authoritative source or creating a new course. If someone has a question about where to get training on something, the training department should be able point to a source for that training, whether they created it or not.

This is where the power of community software (or Web 2.0) comes into play. The training department obviously can’t keep track of all those training needs for themselves. Once you reach a critical mass ratio of training professionals to employees, the job just becomes too much to track for the training department by itself to meet the ideal goal. But if the training department can work with the IT department to create and structure community/networking software to enable those connections to be made with input from other departments, with oversight by the training team, then you’re suddenly much closer to the ideal. It’s important that the individual departments feel empowered to make contributions to this site, otherwise you’re back to the training team needing to come up with everything. If someone has a question, you look it up on the community-driven “solutions” site and either point to the right resource, if it exists, or begin to create the plan for getting it.

Now, how do you make sure the sources/solutions derived from the site are authoritative? To some extent you can probably rely on the community to police that itself, but that’s why the training department has oversight of the community site. They should validate the sources, or have the sources validated by a Subject Matter Expert.

To get to the second bullet of the original questions, how much time do you spend discussing information found on non-approved locations? That’s a pretty hard question, because it could be perfectly valid, and possibly even superior, information. I would say that if you’re in a course, you’re generally on a schedule and are teaching a “standard” practice of some kind that has been vetted and agreed upon. Challenges to that standard should be welcomed, but shouldn’t interfere with class time. If a short discussion isn’t enough to smooth over any discrepancies, I’d drop it into a “parking lot” or into the discussion forum or community software for evaluation and validation. If a change to the standard is warranted based on the new information, it should be implemented with thanks.

The really short version of what I’m saying here is that it’s the training department’s responsibility to enable learning, but it’s the individual departments and employees who truly have the responsibility for learning. The training team should make avenues available, but it’s up to the individuals to use the tools and opportunities provided to take responsibility for their own learning.

I think there’s one other thing implied in the original question: how do you prove that you’re meeting your “responsibility” to provide quality sources? What’s the measurement? It’s certainly not “butts in seats,” which is what many executives ask for. I honestly don’t have a quick answer for this part, though. I’m more in the camp of, “if it’s working, you’ll know” but that’s not generally enough for most executives.