Addressing client mindsets

Over the past few weeks, in a range of different situations, I have bumped into a few assumptions that I have had to challenge. Working as a consultant, I regard it as part of my job to challenge existing mindsets where necessary. I also have no qualms about doing so within my community of practice.

So let's take a look at some of the issues I've addressed... and how:

"We need to track learning"

First of all, you can't track learning. The only way you can tell whether somebody has taken something on board is to observe their behaviour in the workplace. If it changes to incorporate the new material/process/whatever... then they have learned something. The best thing you can do is track access to learning materials. This is no indication that learning has taken place. If person X simply clicks 'next' every few seconds and keeps going right to the end, your LMS is going to tell you that they have successfully completed the course.

It is true that certain levels of tracking will allow you to check how long a user spent on each page, from which you can draw realistic conclusions about whether or not they actually read the material on each page, but whoa! Who is actually going to do this job? Whose time can you afford to allocate to this task when there is so much real work to be done? And once they have identified that person X failed to spend long enough on pages 12, 45 and 67, what then? Are you really going to go after them with a big stick and force them to go back and do those pages again?

"We must have an assessment"

Let's just make one thing totally clear: a series of multiple choice questions with options such that even the average Joe from off the street could select the correct answer, is not an assessment. It's an attendance register. Okay?

If yours is a regulated industry and you are obliged to have some kind of butt-covering tick box, then fine. But let's not pretend to each other that it is anything other than that. If this is not the case, why exactly do you want an assessment? You could provide a few thought provoking scenarios. I'm all in favour of that, but do you really need to record some kind of test score? Would something along these lines not suffice?

Once again, the best way to assess whether people have learned anything is in the form of observable behaviour change on the job.

"People need to know this"
Really? Why? Because they need to observe it? Ah. So what you're actually after is not that they should know something, but that they should do something, right? Can we agree that knowing is not necessarily linked to doing? How many people know what the speed limit is in any given area? How many people observe it? Knowing isn't the goal.

Besides, let's face it, most 'policies' are pretty much common sense recorded in formal language with too many commas. In cases like this, I refer people to Cathy Moore's action mapping post. I've lost count of the number of people with whom I've shared that post!

"We need a half-hour elearning course on xyz"

Mostly when L&D people get this sort of request, they just nod and get on with it. I'd like to encourage them to push back. C'mon people: add a little value, already! Ask these questions:

• Why?
• What is it for?
• What will people do differently afterwards?
• Which of the organisation's strategic goals are being addressed, here?

Do you really need an 'elearning course'? Could not just distribute a pdf? When I suggest this, I am often told that the people don't read pdfs. Well, let me share a little secret with you: people don't read information dump-type elearning courses, either. So don't go that route. This takes us back to the Cathy Moore post I referred to above - a far better way of addressing policy changes.

"How can we design this so that it fits with what we can do in Articulate/Packager/X-tool?"

I get really uncomfortable when people adopt this approach. When they have a hammer and try to figure out ways to turn everything into a nail. Does it have to be shiny? Sometimes the answer is absolutely yes, but not as often as we are led to believe. Sometimes all you need is a simple roadmap diagram, or a list of procedural steps with a list of links to user generated screen capture videos or testimonial video clips taken with web/flip cameras.

Xtranormal - what fun!

Here's a free tool you can use to put together some quick animated movies. It looks pretty straightforward and rather fun. I can think of umpteen uses for it, both in schools and in business.

Sharing a story about a garden

Thanks to Dave Snowden for this link. I am excited about the aggregation of subjective anecdotes (using SenseMaker™) that form the heart of this piece of research. The researchers have asked contributors to share a story about their garden... or any garden. It can be a positive or a negative experience.

Why not add your perspective?

Twitter grader... yup!

I got a message from a new follower on Twitter today, telling me he had found me on Twitter Grader. I followed the link, entered my username (karynromeis) as directed and was presented with this:
It seems I am currently ranked 42,441 out of 2,289,735. Now I'm not sure what that means, exactly, but I suspect that, at the very least, you should probably be tugging your forelock about now! Apparently, I am a member of the Twitter elite in my county (how's that forelock?).

Most importantly of all, my grade is 98.3 out of 100.

D'you think this is like golf, or sprinting where a low number is better, or like a bank balance where a high number is better? I decided to try and find out by clicking on the handy 'How it Works' button just below my grade. That took me here.

Of course, they're not about to reveal their algorithm to us, so I still don't know how I came to have that score. What I do know is that the number of followers plays a role, something which the people behind the tool defend. I can't imagine that my meagre 600-odd followers counts for much when there are people with tens of thousands (perhaps even millions?) of followers. But this is just one factor. Other factors are:

• power of followers - so the grade of my followers affects my grade. Not sure how they determine the grade of the followers in the first place, though - a bit chicken and egg, that.
• frequency of updates
• recency of updates
• follower/following ratio - so if many people follow me, but I only follow a few, this counts in my favour. I can hear @josepicardo expressing indignation from here!
• engagement - this refers to being retweeted, being @named and obviously, it matters what grade of twit retweets or @names you - to me, this may be the most valid measure.
  

It turns out the grade thing is like a bank balance, i.e. the higher the number, the better.

None of this helped me find out how @jobrich used the tool to find me. He seems to have found a lot of people that way. So I went back to the Twitter grade report page. On the top right hand side, are some links. One takes you to elite users in various locations. Perhaps @jobrich just searched for all the Twitter elite in the UK.

One very useful feature of the tool is that you can search for terms that are of interest to you. Once you have found out who tweets regularly about stuff that interests you, you can opt to follow them and widen your network.

Namechk

Today, via a Facebook group, I learned about namechk, a mashup which allows you to see whether your username is available on a variety of social media sites. Since usernames and online identity are increasingly intertwined, it's a useful service to have.

learninganorak is available everywhere except YouTube - where it has been taken by me! What would be nice now, would be a way to reserve the name in all those spaces in one batch!

Creating animations

Thanks to Irmeli Aro for the pointer (via Facebook) to this neat little tool, called Dvolver, which can be used to create animated vignettes.

Of course, it is limited, but I reckon a creative person could work within its limits to create some pretty neat movie-lets to use in a variety of situations.

I had great fun playing with it this morning, but I'm a bit embarrassed by my lame attempts at humour to share them here.

The widgetal age

Widgadget (anyone want to guess how it should be pronounced?) offers users the opportunity to create widgets free of charge. Here's one for this blog. Now to figure out how to add it to my website (which is very tightly locked down):

Blurb - for a beautiful gift

This evening I heard about Blurb from the seldom seen (blogwise, at any rate) Michael Sivers and his lovely wife. Said lovely wife used it to make her Mom's Christmas present. Uploading photos and text, she created a beautiful, hardcover coffee table book of her Mom's five grandchildren which moves the grateful recipient to tears every time she talks about it. And all this for the sum of £12 including P&P.

It's my Mom's 70th birthday at the end of this year. I think I've just figured out what to give her.

Making iStock lightboxes work for you

In spite of the shortcomings of so many iStock photos (whiter-than-white, straight teeth; everyone posing and smiling; distinct corporate bias; preponderance of US-centric images etc.), it remains a very useful place from which to source images for powerPoint presentations, user manuals and elearning materials. They not only stock photos, they also have an excellent supply of symbolic graphics which I find even better than the photos for PowerPoint slides and elearning pages.

But I've discovered that many people under-use the lightbox facility, so I thought I'd give a quick rundown on some of the advantages I've discovered. First let me explain what it is that many people seem to do instead. Bear in mind that lightboxes can only be created and/or used by those who have created a log in identity (how else is the system going to keep track of which lightbox is yours?).

What I've found is that many people will find a promising looking image and download a comp, or save the image with the protecting watermark across it to their own system. Perhaps to a folder on their hardrive, or to a network folder, where the project team members can all see it.

Using lightboxes allows you to do effectively exactly the same thing, except that this way, the metadata comes with the images, allowing you to search through them using a range of different keywords, rather than having to view each one individually.

Let me explain...

First - what is a lightbox?
This is a virtual holding space in which you can place images that you thing might be suitable for some or other purpose, at no expense to yourself. You can collect as many images there as you like and then come back to them later to decide which ones you're actually going to buy.

Creating a lightbox:
So you've used the search facility and ben offered a gazillion images that might be appropriate. You've spotted one within that lot that looks promising. You've selected that image and are now on the screen from which you could choose to buy and download it. Just to the right of the image, you will see the section labelled File Tools. Select the option to Add to a Lightbox.

This dialog box will open up. Since you don't yet have any lightboxes, yet, there is no option to use an existing one. If you already have a lightbox, the dialog box will be slightly different, but you'll get the idea. Enter the name for your lightbox, together (if you like) with a short description and a few keywords. I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that it's a good ide to give the lightbox a name that will make it easy to find again. If you're working on a presentation for a conference, or an elearning module for a project, why not use the name of the conference or the project? Hit Add, and in one fell swoop you've created a new lightbox and added an image to it.

Adding an image to an existing lightbox
Once you've created one or more lightboxes, you can add images to them to your heart's content. Simply select the individual image, and use the option to add it to a lightbox. This dialog box will open. Use the drop down arrow to reveal your lightboxes and select the required one. as you can see, you can opt to add a new lightbox at any point.

Public lightboxes
You can choose to make a lightbox public or private. I won't presume to tell you the circumstances under which you might choose one or the other. If an image has been saved to existing public lightboxes, this information will appear in the File Tools section. You may find it useful to trawl through those lightboxes to see if there are any other images that will suit your purpose - especially if it seems the lightbox was created to address an issue similar to yours.

Managing your lightboxesIf you look at the banner across the top of your iStock screen, you will notice the lightboxes link. Use this to access your lightboxes (and to see the featured lightbox of the week). This page will tell you whether your lightboxes are public or private - they are set to private by default. Select Manage to edit the settings of your lightboxes.

Okay fine, so now I know how to do all this, how is it an advantage?
As I mentioned earlier, an image added to a lightbox takes with it all its metadata. So you could save yourself a lot of heartache by using the search facility within a lightbox rather than across the whole of iStock to see whether you already have an image that fits a specific bill.

If you do this sort of thing on a regular basis, your lightbox contents may start to number thousands. Imagine looking through thousands of thumbnails on your system for a specific image. Instead you can opt to run a search on your lightboxes, using a few keywords to pinpoint a specific image.

If you're working with a team, you could tell a team member that you're looking for images with a simiar look and feel to the ones in such and such a lightbox. The team member can then identify a few key words to help them source additional images of the same type.

If you suddenly need more images for a specific resource, you already know that you have a shortlist set aside in your lightbox, and you don't have to go and start again from scratch.

I hope this post will have been of help to a few people. Please let me know. If all I've succeeded in doing is raise questions in your mind, please pose them... someone out there (maybe even me) will have the answer.

If I had a hammer...

Mark Berthelemy addresses one my key concerns about the proliferation of rapid elearning materials.

I have seen some pretty dire PowerPoint presentations posing as learning materials in my lifetime. The thought of these perpetrators authors - being able to sex these things up and get away with inflicting them on learners for even longer...

Silk purse, anyone?