Work on Stuff that Matters: First Principles - Tim O'Reilly

Work on Stuff that Matters: First Principles - O'Reilly Radar:

Tim O'Reilly has been asking people to "work on stuff that matters":

"I'm a strong believer in the social value of business done right. We need to build an economy in which the important things are paid for in self-sustaining ways rather than as charities to be funded out of the goodness of our hearts."

His thoughts are worth reading in their entirety, so check the link above for the full article.

I want to focus, though, on his second point:

"Create more value than you capture"

Organizations and systems that seek to capture more value than they give are doomed to eventual failure.

How does this apply to elearning and training?

I've been around in the industry for over a decade now. I've seen training departments who were more interested in their own bottom line and their perceived importance in the organization than they were about what they actually contributed to the people. They were more interested in controlling information, than they were about growing knowledge. Maybe you've known a department like that? Maybe you're still working in one...

Good organizations need to keep an eye on the bottom line, but their "big goal" needs to be about more than simply making money.

When we are thinking about systems to support "training" (or learning, performance support, skill growth, whatever we want to call it), we should be thinking about creating simple tools and structures that will create value for the user.

The Web itself is a great example of this, as is Twitter: simple structures that give value.

In terms of the development of content, remember that the content is not really the goal.

O'Reilly notes about his own publishing business, that he is never upset to find that others have used his ideas to make themselves wildly successful. Even when he finds that his direct competitors have "stolen" from him to make their businesses better. Because his goal wasn't to control all his ideas:

"If my goal is really "changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators," I'm thrilled when my competitors jump on the bandwagon and help me spread the word!"

What's the big goal of your department?

What's the big goal on your current project?

Does it create more value than it captures?

Stephen Downes talks about OLDaily and online learning

Xiphos : Stephen Downes talks about OLDaily and online learning:

Project Xiphos has an interview with Stephen Downes.

Stephen is widely accepted as the central authority for online education in the edublogging community. He is also widely accepted as the originator of ELearning 2.0. He was the winner of the Individual Blog award in 2005 for his blog OLDaily.

You can download the interview as a podcast.

Action Mapping for eLearning Course Design

Design Lively Elearning with Action Mapping

Cathy Moore explains in the Slideshare presentation linked above and embedded below, how her "Action Mapping" concept works.

You can find more info on her website, cathy-moore.com.

I like the basic principle of linking everything to an measurable business goal, and focusing on what people need to do in order to achieve that goal. This turns traditional corporate training development on its head. Here action mapping technique promotes the development of activities that simulate real world scenarios.

I'm not sure I like the graphical treatment, something about it strikes me as inelegant. But the concepts are solid and should improve instructional design if your organization is still stuck in the "information dump" mode.

... plus, you gotta love ninjas.

Design Lively Elearning with Action Mapping

View more presentations from Cathy Moore. (tags: concept mapping instructional design)

Aren't books dead yet?

E-Learning Curve Blog: What’s on your e-learning bookshelf?

Michael Hanley lists the e-learning books he keeps on his shelf.

It's startling to find someone who actually keeps books -- books about e-learning. To learn about e-learning, we need books? Physical books, made out of dead trees?

It just seems counter-intuitive, doesn't it?

Couldn't we just have a wiki, and let the collective intelligence of the learning community build the perfect resource?

Do you have any books hiding in your closet?

The Authors Guild's Next Target?

Life Rocks 2.0: Listen to Website Content with Internet Text Speaker

Life Rocks 2.0 points to a freeware application that will read web content aloud:

"Internet Text Speaker is a freeware utility which can speak any selected text from any website. Internet Text Speaker once installed will integrates itself to the Internet Explorer and Firefox context menu i.e. the right click menu. Whenever you want to listen to any text on the website, select the text and then right click and choose Speak Text option."

Given the recent decision by Amazon to cave to the Authors Guild regarding the text-to-speech feature in the Kindle2, I wonder whether applications like this will be next to be attacked by writers and the publishing industry.

After all, this tool is designed to create unlicensed derivative works…

A Vision of 2019

Microsoft Office Labs vision 2019 (montage video) - istartedsomething

At the Wharton Business Technology Conference, Microsoft’s Business Division president, Stephen Elop, unveiled the latest video production from Microsoft Office Labs called “2019″. This is part of a series called "Envisioning".

You can view the video at the link at the top of this post (both the short "montage" and the full-length piece).

Download Mr. Elop's PowerPoint presentation for more detail on Microsoft's vision.

The visualization of ubiquity is what most interested me. Flexible, unbreakable, transparent displays, "pico projection" (the ability for small handheld devices to project full-size images onto any flat surface), and 3D transparent overlays, will truly introduce the age of computing ubiquity. While now our cellphones, GPS units, and netbooks allow tiny portals into the digital world that walks beside us, future devices will allow an almost seamless integration of digital and physical.

Doodling boosts memory?

A Sketchy Brain Booster: Doodling | Wired Science from Wired.com:

Wired examines a study that finds doodling may help students pay attention.

"Asked to remember names they'd heard on a recording, people who doodled while listening had better recall than those who didn't. This suggests that a slightly distracting secondary task may actually improve concentration during the performance of dull tasks that would otherwise cause a mind to wander."

Before we ask all our students to start doodling during lessons, or provide online doodle tools for our elearning content, it should be noted that the study found that doodling helps subjects pay attention during "dull" tasks.

The subjects were asked to memorize a string of random names, with no context.

"'People may doodle as a strategy to help themselves concentrate,' said study co-author Jackie Andrade, a University of Plymouth psychologist. 'We might not be aware that we're doing it, but it could be a trick that people develop because it helps them from wandering off into a daydream.'"

So doodling may be a mechanism to stop people from tuning out altogether. But there is no evidence to suggest that it enhances learning where the content is engaging and relevant to the learner and provided in context.

Also, like the recent study regarding podcasts, the sample size in this study was rather limited. 40 students were studied, half doodled, while the other half did not.