Last year I laid out in January my Ten Predictions for eLearning 2008. In my post, 2008 2009 - written in December 2008, I looked at how well I did in those predictions, and my results were pretty good, not perfect. So, let’s try it again this year …

#1 - “Self-Directed Learning” Increases

Due to economic pressures, companies are going to reduce training budgets to a point where it doesn’t make sense to create content on marginal topics. Instead, we will call this “self-directed learning” and will do our best to support the workforce to learn it on their own with minimal guidance and support.

#2 - eLearning 2.0 Grows - But Creating “eLearning 2.0 Strategy” Fails

One of the better, cheap support mechanisms for self-directed learning are web 2.0 tools. As such, eLearning 2.0 will show continued growth. We will especially see a rapid growth in the use of wikis for content presentation. There will also be growth in discussions and social networks for collaborative learning.

At the same time, organizations who try to create big eLearning 2.0 Strategies will move much slower than organizations who adopt easy to use tools and make tactical use of these tools.

Corollary: if you have SharePoint installed, you will be using SharePoint a lot more this year.

#3 - Increase in Consumer/Education Social Learning Solutions will Increase Pressure for Social Learning Solutions in Corporate Learning

Sorry, I couldn’t figure out a shorter way to say this. 2008 was an interesting year that saw a myriad of new start-ups offering content through interesting new avenues. Social learning solutions like social homework help provided by Cramster; CampusBug, Grockit, TutorVista, EduFire, English Cafe, and the list goes on and on.

What will happen to about 20% of the workplace learning professionals is that some VP/C level in your company will have their teenager or college age kid use one of these services and tell them about it. They will they proceed to wonder why you aren’t doing something similar.

It’s the change where consumer leads education leads corporate.

#4 - Quick Wins & Toolkits

With the tough economy, everyone will be looking for quick wins. How can you improve performance quickly and at low cost? The answer for many organizations will be less training and more performance support in the form of toolkits. Teach me less about communication and give me more templates for important, tough communication points.

Off-the-shelf content companies will be moving to meet this need by emphasizing quick wins through resources.

#5 - Virtual Classroom Tipping Point

Based on a few different conversations and experiences, I believe that we’ve reached a point where virtual classroom training is no longer seen as inherently inferior and a lower value. Some training will still be preferred face to face such as when team building or in-person soft skills are important, but 2009 will be the year when we realize that we should be justifying any in-person training. Price points for virtual classroom training will begin to be virtually the same as for the same in-person classes.

Corrollary: transition to virtual means greater demand for help on effective virtual classroom training and for people who are good at creation effective remote experiences.

#6 - Greater Domination by Leading Tool Vendors - Captivate, Articulate, Lectora, Camtasia

Captivate 4 is going to be a great tool. Articulate has a great tool set. Lectora is great at packaging. Camtasia is good at screencasting. It’s going to be tough for me-too tools to push out these players in the corporate market. In some settings, free authoring tools may do better, but they probably won’t get much traction in workplace training.

#7 - Niche Tools Emerge and Get Traction in Niches

So the caveat to the above statement about the big players getting bigger is that I believe we will see more and more niche tools get traction. We’ve seen some traction by the game show type tools such as those by LearningWare. We may also see use of Flash Quiz Tools, polls, survey tools or something like Harbinger Knowledge’s Team Pod. These things can create fun interactions that easily fit into a course built with one of the above tools. They also fit into a wiki page. It’s also interesting to see effort’s like Articulate’s Community Interactions - which is essentially the ability to add specialized interactions including new types of interactions from the developer community.

#8 - More Wiki Pages - Same Authored Minutes - Less Classroom Minutes

I pretty much already said this, but I might as well mention it again. The above trends around eLearning 2.0, self-directed learning, quick wins and toolkits all suggest that more web pages - authored via wikis - will be the name of the game in 2009. The goal of lower cost will continue the transition from classroom to courseware which will keep the total number of authored minutes about the same, even with the move of content from courses to web pages.

#9 - Knowledge Worker Skills

Topic growing rapidly, problem getting recognized, more and more people offering workshops and solutions to address this

I realized in 2007 that there’s a very important Knowledge Worker Skill Gap
emerging. In 2008, I felt compelled to launch Work Literacy, and help help people and organizations upgrade skills like Leveraging Networks, Network Feedback, Finding Expertise, Using Social Media to Find Answers to Questions, Learning through Conversation and searching, scanning, etc.

2009 is going to be a big year for this issue. The fact that this is one of the general sessions at ASTD TechKnowledge is interesting way to start 2009. We are now offering a Work Literacy Skills Workshop. This is going to get more and more attention this year. Especially as employers move more towards self-directed learning.

#10 - Mobile Learning Niche Growth

Last year I said mobile learning would be well below where people were expecting. While I still think this will be a relatively small percentage of activity, this year, I expect to be a year in which mobile becomes more I believe that we will see continued increase in the percentage of people walking around with mobile web access. This will offer increased interesting opportunities such as:

Real-time Polls - We are just beginning to see tools like Poll Everywhere that allow mobile polling. That way an audience sitting at an in-person conference will have some of the capabilities that they do online. (Did I mention the move towards virtual classroom?)
Job aids / quick reference - about 30% of you are going to be asked to make sure your content is viewable on an iPhone.
Podcasts / Vidcasts targeting mobile professionals (ex. sales people)
Sales challenge scoreboard - For some mobile professionals, specific types of content such as sales challenges will be delivered through mobile solutions.

At the same time, the wild enthusiasm for mobile learning that was present in 2007 and died down a bit in 2008, will remain somewhat subdued. And we won’t see much adoption as the central vehicle for learning content delivery.

#11 - Micro Virtual Conferences

The move towards acceptance of virtual classroom means that there will slowly begin to be acceptance of virtual conferences. Conferences this year will also do this because their other alternative is to be canceled from lack of people able to pay for travel. But because we are all going to be maxed out, expected to do 10% more work with 10% less people, we won’t have time to go for several days. Instead, we will see the creation of things that are in between a full virtual conference and something that’s a few sessions. These things will be more targeted and deeper. Many of them will be from ad hoc sources, such as George, Jay and myself.

#12 - Data Driven

With the economic situation, there will be greater demand for results and thus more interest in data-driven performance solutions.

Remote Collaboration

elearning Technology - Tony Karrer - January 20th, 2009

My primary interest here are the methods and tools that allow us to work better as part of remote work teams. In other words -

How do we collaborate together in remote work teams to be as effective or even more effective than a team that works down the hall?

Let me admit that I’m likely in over my head when talking about methods and tools for collaboration. I cannot claim to be an expert, and I feel like this topic demands a lot of soft skills such as communication skills, team skills, handling cultural and work style issues, etc. as well as knowing about tools and methods.

My focus in this post is mostly on the Tool Set and a little bit about methods - as is the focus of this series. So, this post is only a small portion of the answer.

I’m particularly drawing on both personal experience and on experience with the work skills workshops we are offering. At the start of these workshops, we put people into remote work teams. At the core, when I look at what a team needs, it’s a pretty simple list:

Real-time

Voice
Screen Sharing
Document Editing (sometimes)

Asynchronous

Share / collaborate on documents, web pages
Discussion
Notification

Of course, I’m simplifying by leaving out things like video chat, recording, etc.

Real-time Voice

I have had great success with a number of tools. So while I’m listing the following because they are good initial choices, there are a lot of Collaboration Tools out there.

Skype - Fantastic voice tool for 1-to-1 as well as conference calls up to 25 people. See: Quick Start Guide for New Skype Users.

Freeconference.com - For times when someone cannot be online, this service works great to establish a quick conference line.

Real-time Screen Sharing

Again, same caveat - lots of great tools that provide screen sharing. A few starting points:

Adobe Connect Now - free online meetings for up to three people.

DimDim - Still a little rough around the edges, but a great, free tool.

Real-time Document Editing

I’ve had two experiences recently that have really struck me around real-time document editing.

One was having a small (7 person) project team get together on a conference call and have all of us editing the status report real-time via Google Spreadsheets. You could see where people are working. People moved ahead of the conversation and updated status notes so we could skip them. We found we would discuss what needed to be discussed, agree on the next step and see it appear real-time. You leave the meeting with an agreed to status report, action steps, etc. It’s truly a thing of beauty.

The other experience I mentioned in Real-Time Collaborative Editing, Robin Good used MindMeister to allow participants to collectively edit a Mind Map during a session at the Learning Trends. It resulted in a great learning experience and a quite good resource.

Asynchronous Content Sharing / Editing

In terms of using these products with remote work teams, Google Spreadsheets seems to have hit the most important items for me. In addition to the real-time editing described above, it also has notifications of changes to people who are collaborating on the document. For some (inexplicable) reason, Google Docs does not.

I also heavily use Wikis, especially when the desired result is a set of web pages. I recommend pbWiki as an easy to use Wiki solution. If you are not familiar with Wikis - here’s a quick introduction -

Here are additional resources for people new to Wikis collected as part of the Work Literacy course:

5 Uses for a Wiki at Work

Wikis as Personal Space

Examples of Educational Wikis
Horizon Project–Vicki Davis’s “Flat Classroom Project”–outstanding example of how to use a wiki for learning.
Wiki Wake-up Call and Use Cases
WikiPatterns–A great collection of patterns and “anti-patterns” that spur (or impede) wiki adoption

Because I use Delicious as part of my better memory, I like it when work teams use it to share web pages that are relevant to the team. To do that, you must first agree on a tag to use to indicate it’s part of the work teams’ effort. You should already be doing that individually, this only requires an added step of getting agreement with the group.

The next level of my better memory was taking notes. I mentioned that I either do that through working documents or through a blog. Those exact mechanisms should be extended out to the work team. Blogs are an excellent way to allow the work team to see stream of thought of team members.

Other tools that fit into sharing content:

Google Calendar - great calendar tool especially when collaborating on calendars.
Xdrive: Online storage to share files.
YouSendIt: Clean way to send large files.
Flickr: Share and find photos.

Asynchronous Discussion

I personally have found that Ning works great as a tool for all sorts of different needs. Creating a new Ning network is very easy and it gives you a lot of what you would want / need as a work team. Here are a couple of quick guides to getting started on Ning:

How to Create Your Own Social Network with Ning

Start Your Own Social Network in Minutes with Ning

Of course, if you’ve not yet joined some of the existing Learning Communities on Ning, then go do that right now so you are used to how it works.

Work Team Notification

Notification of team members of what’s going on with the team is incredibly important. I already mentioned that the fact that Google Docs does not support notification makes it more difficult to use as a solution.

The bottom line on most work teams is that you want to have a reliable notification of changes, discussion, etc. done by the team; to the appropriate channel; with the appropriate frequency. There are two primary notification channels that most work teams wants:

Email - periodic or real-time notification of changes.
RSS - feed changes into an RSS reader that will be checked as needed

As members of the work team, we should be able to control what goes where and with what frequency.

Teamwork Tips and Skills

If you want a lot more on this, you can go to: http://delicious.com/tag/virtualteams

Other Collaboration Tools

There are a lot of tools that can be considered Collaboration Tools.

Networks and Communities

elearning Technology - Tony Karrer - January 14th, 2009

Mercenary Rationale for Network Work & Learning

As I discussed in Evaluating Performance of Concept Workers, evaluating the performance of a concept worker is difficult because there’s no right answer and most often the evaluator knows less about the subject than the worker.

Thus, the bottom line in evaluating a concept workers performance is by looking at:

Was a reasonable process used?
Are the conclusions reasonable?
How would this compare to results from other concept workers?

To make sure you pass this test - I suggest cheating. And there is no better cheat for the concept worker than reaching out to other people to test your process and conclusions. Basically make sure you can say,

“Look, I talked to a couple of people who have done this before. They said I’ve gone through the right steps. I’ve looked at the right stuff. My answer seems pretty reasonable. If they would have done it, they would have come up with the same thing.”

Limits of Search

In Value from Social Media, I looked at a scenario where I’m evaluating a particular solution for my company / organization. Through Google, I find a lot of information. But in many cases, I will still be left feeling uncomfortable …

What’s really going to happen?
Did I miss something important?
How important are the various issues?
Is my answer reasonable?

These are common questions when only search is used. Often it’s difficult to use search to address:

Experience - What have been the experiences of other organizations (not the canned case studies) when they’ve used this solution.
Boundaries / Existence - I’ve got a particular issue and I’m not sure if answers to that issue exist out there, I’ve not found it in my searching.
Confirmation - I’m beginning to have an answer, but I’d like to get confirmation of the answer based on my particular situation based on experience.
Importance - Some of the issues I see, I’m not sure how important they are in practice, should I be concerned.

However, each of these can be directly addressed through conversation. This is why I say that Leveraging Networks is Key Skill.

I’m coming to believe this is the most important Knowledge Worker Skill Gap.

Network Readiness

Before you can reach into a network or community to seek conversation, you generally need to have spent time on

Building some level of connection (network building).
Being ready to engage to seek conversation (network access).

Patti Anklam, in Seven Leaders Lessons tells us:

High-performing people tend to have stronger, more intentional networks.

The word “intentional” is intentional. You have to look systematically at your networks and communities to be in position to be able to use them as part of your work and learning. As part of your top-down evaluation, one of the points you have to evaluate is whether you have appropriate networks and communities. Even if you are a member of LinkedIn, you may not have links to people in the right fields. Thus, you may have to spend time building some initial links so that you can reach out effectively. Similarly, you should spend a bit of time finding the right communities.

I personally do a lot of my network building slowly. I try to get people into my networks when I meet them (for example connect on LinkedIn). I keep my ears open for new communities and often lurk for a while to see what’s going to happen there.

When I’m relatively new to an area, then I spend much more time building my network. Recently I started up with a new client in a new area. I spent a good chunk of time my first month reaching out (mostly through LinkedIn) to make connections with people who had lots of related experience to get thoughts and ideas around particular issues that we might face - and found a lot more issues that I hadn’t considered. I also signed up to a couple Ning communities where I’m lurking. Now I have a great starting point when I want further conversation.

Conversation Seeking

So bottom line is that it’s really important for us to be able to seek out different forms of conversation inside and especially outside our organizations. There are a myriad of different places and ways to seek conversations.

A few months ago, we asked how people went about deciding where and how to seek conversations. The answer was, as always, it depends.

Karyn Romeis uses a series that goeses from people she already knows who might be experts then to less known connections. She looks at distance vs. likelihood vs. experience vs. cost.

Karl Kapp makes the point that you should ask in multiple places because you never know who might have the answer and the overall cost is negligible.

I think there’s some risk of being spammy if you ask too broad, but Karl has somewhat convinced me that what I really need:

Find networks and communities related to my future needs
Know mechanisms used to seek conversations in these networks and communities
Build enough connection into networks and communities to be ready to leverage
Be able to quickly and with minimal effort seek conversation in appropriate networks and communities.

So, it’s being aware of what’s available, getting integrated enough to have it open for use, and be able to navigate it when you need it.

The top two slam dunk answers here are:

LinkedIn
Various learning communities

I personally also use my blog and twitter

Blog
Twitter

If you look at my top two, they would both be called social networks.

Introduction to Social Networking

Before You Seek Conversation

There’s an acronym that everyone should know - RTFM. It stands for Read the Friggin Manual. It’s a common response to stupid questions posted in certain communities. To me its a reminder that before you ever seek a conversation you should have done your homework.

Your homework is:

Search the web - save related content
Search the community / network for prior discussion - save related
Maybe ask someone you know already for a reality check

This arms you with the basics before you ask your question or seek conversation. It also allows you to ask the best kind of question -

I’ve searched on the web and in this community for information on X and I found A, B, C.

But I am not finding Y, I’d like to find people who can help.

-or-

I’m concluding Z, but I’d like to talk to people who have done this.

You are showing that you’ve done your homework. Your question will be much more interesting. You are providing value via the question with the appropriate links. And this form of inquiry gets much better response.

You will notice that in this template question, I am asking for a conversation. In some cases, I will change it to ask for written responses.

There’s quite a bit about the use of LinkedIn for this purpose, so rather than reciting it here, please go check out:

For me, the bottom line usage of LinkedIn really comes down to three primary activities:

Seeking conversation directly - LinkedIn for Finding Expertise
Asking questions to get written answers and to seek conversation - Searching for Expertise - LinkedIn Answers. Note: I often try to connect with people who provide answers directly (via Skype or phone) to discuss in more detail.
Having discussions via groups - which acts much like questions and I do the same thing.

It’s very interesting to see how LinkedIn Answers and Groups has given us new opportunities to surface interested experts and having that connected to known mechanisms for sparking conversation.

If you’ve never approached a few people for a conversation on a topic via LinkedIn, then you should make that happen within the next month.

Learning Communities

The key here is to have ready access to a variety of communities. Take a look at the Learning Communities List.

Additional Reading

Patti Anklam has a series on living in a network age:

From her series:

High-performing people tend to have stronger, more intentional networks.

Other Related Tools and Methods

MetaFilter - Answers to Anything

Information Radar

elearning Technology - Tony Karrer - January 13th, 2009

For many of the roles and projects you will be involved in, part of what you need to be able to do is to put yourself in a continuous learning mode. You need information radar that continuously scans for new, quality information that you should be aware of. And certainly, you have to be able to quickly commit it to your metamemory.

Information Addiction

Let me start this topic with a word of caution. Most of you reading this are infovores. When you find new nuggets of information, you get a chemical reaction in your brain much like an opium hit. This reaction causes you to seek more information. In other words, you are quite literally an information addict. Be careful about feeding your habit.

Assess Information Sources

For this reason, I always start any new task, project, role with an honest assessment of whether I really need to be actively tuned into information and what information that is.

You should also periodically go back to your top-down strategy, assess your specific information objectives and then make a deliberate assessment of different information sources. Which newspapers, magazines, journals, news sources, blogs should you look at, how often, how high a priority is this?

Also assess current information sources to see which can be removed. Managing your RSS Feeds has some good suggestions on how to do assessment in an ongoing basis using quarantine folders.

With that caution, here are some thoughts on the methods and tools I use as part of my information radar.

RSS Readers

A central tool for my information radar is my RSS reader. It allows me to gather information from all kinds of sources (blogs, publications, wikis, calendars, etc.) If you are new to the world of RSS readers and subscribing to blogs, here are some good starting points.

Skim and Remember

In Stop Reading - Skim Dive Skim, I proposed that for most of the information we come across via our information radar, we will not read it. Instead we will, skim, dive, skim. And then quickly add it to our better memory.

Remembering content I’ve seen via my RSS Reader has changed a bit over the past few years. I used to use Keep New or Favorites to save items that I thought were interesting but that I didn’t have time to read or process at that moment. I found that it scattered a big part of my memory into another source, so I’ve stopped using these techniques.

Thus, while I’m scanning I have three levels of remember ready to apply:

1. Visit Pages - If a post, article, etc. looks like it might ever be worth remembering, then I visit the page and skim it there so it goes into Google History. Posts that you have seen in your reader but not visited are not in Google History. They are searchable via the RSS Reader, but that requires that you remember how your originally encountered the information. I believe I’m better off with fewer places to search for things I’ve seen.

2. Tag Page - If while skimming the article you visited, it looks like something I might need later (future anticpated information need), then I save/tag it in delicious.

3. Notes / Blog - As I skim dive skim, I often will take notes into working documents or blog posts about anything that is interesting. I do this more to help me process the material. But it also helps to surface it again. Make sure you save a link to the source as well.

Information Trickles

For information needs where I want a trickle of information to be coming through and if I miss something “interesting” its not a problem. I’m looking for filtering the content to find the best stuff within a narrow range.

Aggregator Blogs. These folks scan through content in a given area and point you to the stuff they feel is most interesting. The three that jump to mind in the world of learning and eLearning are: OL Daily, Big Dog Little Dog, and eLearning Learning.
Delicious Popular. Use delicious popular such as http://delicious.com/popular/elearning this shows web pages that many people are tagging with a particular tag. There is a feed for any delicious page including the popular pages.

Information Floods

For areas where I want to be fairly actively engaged in a continuous flow and there’s a greater need to see most everything, I use:

Google Blog Search - use this to scan for very specific terms and/or links in posts. Unfortunately, it’s a bit broken right now and shows you more than you want but a fix is promised.
Google Alerts - similar to blog search but use this to scan for terms outside of blogs.
Delicious tags - you can subscribe to a particular delicious tag such as http://delicious.com/tag/elearning2.0 or http://delicious.com/tag/workliteracy or http://delicious.com/popular/elearning
Twitter - can provide you a flood of real-time, 140 character posts from people who you follow. I’ll talk more about twitter in a later post, but in the meantime, before you go and sign up for too much twitter, please read Twitter - Nevermind.

Other Tools

AideRSS - can be used to limit a given blog or set of blogs to the top few.

Blogging

For me, blogging fits into more than one category. I’m choosing to put it here as I most often use it as a means of processing information that I come across as part of my continuous learning strategy. It definitely moves beyond a simple information radar and into something more. It also is a big part of my networking and community strategy.

As a starting point

Taking Notes

As an alternative to blogging, another option to help remember and process what you are finding through your information radar is the act of taking notes. There are a variety of tools that you can use. I hate to say it, but I still use notepad or Word. Since I rely on desktop search, they work okay for me. My guess is that in another year I’ll have a different answer.

Independent of the tool, research shows that the act of taking active notes - not verbatim notes but higher level cognitive notes - while you are receiving information improves encoding. Thus, its fair to assume (though I don’t have research proof on this) that while you are skim-dive-skimming active note taking means greater encoding.

Several people have suggested to me that it’s significantly easier to take notes on paper while reviewing online. Ummm … no it’s not. Keep a narrow window open alongside your browser that allows you to copy and paste and add your notes. Oh, and make sure you include the URL. I hate it when I find my notes but then have to search for the page again in my bookmarks or via Google search.

By the way, this is the same technique I use when I’m talking to someone on the phone or in a meeting. A narrow window for capturing real-time thoughts works well for me. Oh, wait, am I talking about better memory now or information radar. I guess it’s both.

A big part of effective information radar is doing more than just having it temporarily pass by your eyeballs.

It’s adding it to memory and processing it appropriately.

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