A short list of my favorite IDOL bookmarks

To my fellow Capella - soon to be - graduates:

I will add more to this post in the following weeks as the dust settles and I bask in the great feeling of being done with my Masters. !!!

I completed the Training & Performance Improvement track, it was the perfect combination of depth with high-level macro scope. I was able to develop skills for identifying performance gaps, recommending the best solutions, and evaluating their impact ... (in a nut shell).

In doing some reflection on my integrative project, I am realizing that because I chose to develop an actual program, it allowed me to really focus in on my passion for IDOL, and explore the state of this specific industry. With the rapid advancement of technology combined with the current economy - there is (and will be) a huge rush to leveraging web based solutions. It will be important that we stand our ground and use what we have learned to make sure the RUSH to the online learning is done with responsibility and caution. As we all know e-learning is not a panacea.

I am especially interesting in this whole term and concept of "Rapid-elearning" Is this just an excuse to cut corners to increase volume and lower ID quality?

Enough already, here is my list of bookmarks to share:

Please reply back to this with your favorite bookmarks that you use.

I just found these today, they should offer plenty of good inspiration. Most of them are really well-done, but many are riddled with extraneous load distractions:
Rapid-elearning Examples made with Articulate

This is a great list of some of the best training and IDOL blogs all in one spot:
http://www.pageflakes.com/trainingblogs

http://www.articulate.com/rapid-elearning/

http://c4lpt.co.uk/index.html

http://elearningcurve.blogspot.com/

http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/

Gates on Malaria and Education

You may have heard already, Bill Gates received a lot of press for a stunt he pulled at the TED conference last week - In an effort to get the attention of his audience and raise awareness about Malaria, he released a "swarm" of Mosquitoes. Despite being at what has quickly become THE conference to go to if you're rich, smart, or otherwise important - filled with the greatest minds in technology and other things - Gates spoke nothing of technology. Instead he methodically outlines two great problems his foundation is trying to help address. Malaria and Education.

I can clearly tell he has received some good coaching on his presentation delivery skills - as well as his PowerPoint slide design.

In many ways I consider his talk more pragmatic than inspiring or thought provoking -- which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I think its fair to say that he is doing what he is doing because of the position he is in. I am pretty confident that if most of the people I know, ever had his kind of money - they would be doing similar work. (Gladwell argues this point of privilege thoroughly in his latest: Outliers. In which he ironically uses Gates as a case study)

That said, I think that Bill's calculating approach to problem solving will transfer well to problems of more gravity than whether vista works or not. Most important will be his ability to identify and delegate the right challenges to the right people. Maybe Bill is learning this from Warren Buffet - his largest donor.

Gates pulled and "Oprah" and gave everyone in the audience this book:Work Hard. Be Nice. Written by the founders of the KIPP schools. There is all of this talk about what do to, and how to do it. Well taking a closer look at the organizations who are already doing it, seems like a good place to start.

Check out the talk for yourself below - or on Ted.com here.




Addition: They posted the follow up QA with Chris Anderson in the TEDblog here.

I would be interested to see more data on the health and birth rate correlation.

Digital Overload

Want a distraction?

Here is a good article on how multi-tasking hurts our creativity and ability to focus

Digital Overload is Frying our Brains

What makes Measurable Objectives so difficult to get right?

Learning how to define measurable objectives has been more challenging than I thought it would be. I am now realizing first hand how vital a role measurable objectives play. In these trying times for everyone, the gap between how important objectives are - and how often they are overlooked - is getting wider. Now more than ever, there is a need to evaluate training effectiveness and Return on Investment. Evaluation is impossible without a clear, measurable target. Unfortunately, the ineffectiveness of poorly defined objectives is not realized until attempting to evaluate, and by then it's too late.

I found myself asking what makes this so difficult? Why is it so often overlooked?

In this first post I will outline my answers to these questions. In a following post I will share the tricks I have learned to writing measurable objectives.

Writing Measurable Objectives is difficult because:

1) Knowledge or understanding can not be measured. (but we like to think it can)

On some levels I think we get this, but its easy to forget because so much of our culture wants to hold onto the illusion that we can. Throughout the entire education system we are conditioned to believe that our own knowledge is being measured when it isn’t. How much does knowledge weigh? What does it look like? We can only measure what we can observe and knowledge at its very essence is unobservable. What we can observe and therefore measure is behavior. Where we make the mistake is when through measuring a persons behavior we THINK we are measuring their knowledge.

The measurement of behavior can provide valuable insight, but this insight is often used incorrectly by mistaking correlations as cause and effect. Just because its when its snowing outside its freezing, does not mean that when its freezing outside its snowing. Clearly there are additional l variables to consider. The same is true with the link between knowledge and behavior. There are an infinite number of variables that contribute to a persons behavior. Therefore, knowledge does not cause behavior.

Thomas Gilberts Behavioral Engineering Model (BEM) provides 6 main categories in which we can group the many variables that contribute to a persons behavior.
While the BEM can be used to select a strategy for influencing a persons behavior, it can not be used in reverse. The measurement of a persons behavior should not be mistaken as a measurement of anything other than behavior.

Prezi.com

Going back to the basics and then beyond them.
As promised I wanted to post my initial reactions to the very promising new presentation tool Prezi.com. This quote from their intro presentation is a great place to start.


To be clear, despite any new technology the fact remains that it is much easier to ruin a good speech with a bad PowerPoint (or other visual aids) than it is to make a good presentation better with good visual aids.

Here in a great clip from the great show Mad Men on AMC Don Draper gives an inspiring presentation to the Kodak engineers who are shopping for a Marketing company, this is good presenting 101:


Key elements he used:

1) Emotion
2) Story
3) Images
4) Little to no text on the screen.

When we add all of the glitz and glamor to what we can do with PowerPoint today, it is easy to forget what makes this medium so powerful in the first place. Think back to the last presentation you gave, better yet the last presentation you had to sit through. What was the most memorable part? The long list of bullet points or was it an image, or diagram? The easiest change we can all make that makes the biggest improvement is to use more images and less text.

I will save other ways to improve presentations for later posts.

There are two fundamental concepts that prezi.com introduces.

1) It finally breaks the rigid linear paradigm of having one slide after another, from beginning to end.

2) It adds the ability to display meaningful visual structures of information, that remain in tact both on the screen and therefore in the viewers minds.

Once I have had a chance to build and deliver a few presentations using prezi, I will share more.

SeaDragon

I first saw this concept almost two years ago in Blaise’s Ted.com presentation . I knew this whole paradigm was going to totally transform how information is presented and consumed.

The part of the demo when he shows the mock issue of the Guardian I think does the best job of showing how this will change the general way we think of organizing information. One of the most important elements of effective communication is quickly establishing context. Context is terms of the mental models and structures through which we understand and make sense of new information. The problem lies in that when the sender fails to establish the appropriate context, we the receivers do it ourselves. And we all think we are much better at doing this on our own than we really are. (Mostly because we aren't really aware that we are always doing it.)

The current model of using hyperlinked text can be really effective. However, any visual mental model of related information and concepts is usually very week. For example, tt is easy to forget how you ended up where you are, and still understand the related information as part of the greater structure from which you linked out of...

Well almost two years later, and wrapped of course in Microsofts silverlight.. Seadragon is finally available in Microsoft Live Labs

Microsoft gets credit for releasing things like this in their Labs section... I think it will help with thier branding issues. (everyone hates Vista) With the complexity of new software and the speed at which we demand it, bugs or inevitiable. So with a few bugs aside, and lacking any core marketing message, SeaDragon is here.

The iPhone app is pretty cool. Photosynth is equally impressive from a technical perspective, but less practical.

Be sure to check out the infinite zooming concept applied by Prezi.com for making really cool looking presentions. I will post more about it my next post.