MindLeaders: Fueling the Learning Revolution

How to work with IT departments on new technology training

The cover article in this week's issue of Computerworld is "IT's Top Five Training Mistakes."  (This link is currently returning an error on Computerworld's web site, but hopefully they'll have it fixed soon.) For those of us in the training field, it's mostly a "No kidding, Sherlock," return to the basics, but it's an interesting five-minute walk in IT's shoes, especially if your IT department handles some of their own training.

The article's top five mistakes are:

1. Training is an afterthought.
2. You're out of tune with your audience.
3. You didn't follow standard training models.
4. You're training out of business context.
5. You neglected to forge business partnerships.

The story gives lots of due credit to the training professionals that are hopefully in place in IT departments and their companies. If you're one of those pros, this article might give you a nice touchstone with the folks who are planning new software rollouts. The article advises the IT folks multiple times to come talk to their trainers, but the mountain can also go to Muhammad: maybe this will give you some ideas on the things your IT people need to hear and/or might respond to the most.

What lessons have you learned during new hardware or software rollouts in your organization? How did the coordination with IT/MIS go?

Recalling Our Not-so-Distant Past

Where would your e-Learning program be, today, if not for the Internet? Imagine the frustration that would be visited upon your company if it was suddenly reliant (again) on local data networks, mainframes and physically distributed media for executing its training, learning and organizational development initiatives! Technology has advanced at such a blinding pace that we’re at risk of losing sight of just how recently theses profound advances have come.

Earlier this month, The Science Channel premiered a 4-part documentary, Download: The True Story of the Internet. The series is scheduled for rebroadcast (2 episodes per date) on April 5 & 6.

The series is hosted by John Heilemann who covered the meteoric rise of the Internet and the World Wide Web as a Silicon Valley columnist for Wired magazine. You might also recognize John for his current reporting of the 2008 national presidential races for New York magazine. Below, we’re publishing the Science Channel’s synopsis of the series:

Download: The True Story of the Internet is about a revolution -- the technological, cultural, commercial and social revolution that has radically changed our lives.

And for the first time on television, we hear how it happened from the men and women who made it possible.

From the founders of eBay, Yahoo, Amazon, Netscape, Google and many others, we hear amazing stories of how, in ten short years, the Internet took over our lives. These extraordinary men and women tell us how they went from being geeky, computer obsessed nerds to being 21st-century visionaries in the time it takes most people to get their first promotion. And, how they made untold billions along the way.

The style of the story-telling is up close and personal. With first-hand testimony from the people that matter, we tell a story that has all the excitement of a thriller -- full of battles and back-stabbing, moments of genius and moments of sheer hilarity. You will never surf the net in the same way again.

Download is hosted by technology journalist John Heilemann. He's an edgy, combative, hi-energy New Yorker who never takes anything at face value. He's also a personal friend of most of Silicon Valley's most important characters and he revels in craziness of it all. After all, this is a story in which 20-year-olds become overnight billionaires, create, destroy and re-create more wealth in ten years than the human race has ever seen.

http://science.discovery.com/tv/download/download.html

Putting Second Life/virtual environments to good use

Virtual environments are an up-and-coming learning tool. And like all learning tools, they'll be invaluable in some training applications, best used with a blend of other tools to cover all of a topic's training needs.

Most of those applications are just beginning to be discovered or be feasible, but Tom Werner at Brandon Hall Research found an excellent example of using a virtual environment for a valuable training lesson. Even more surprising to me is that they found a great use of Second Life in particular, which  I think is even harder to pull off.

The training is for health care professionals who work with older patients. The virtual environment (this part is not Second Life-specific) simulates for the player the effects of aging, such as slower mobility and reduced eyesight, hearing, and dexterity. These kinds of lessons are perfect for virtual environments.

I think the Second Life-specific/public playing field part of this training is brilliant: the players experience Second Life with an elderly person avatar, to see how people treat them differently and how many objects are not made for someone of their age and build. It uses the larger game as a living social experiment.

Great thinking here! What training needs do you have that could be met by a Second Life or other virtual simulation?

How to really evaluate Second Life

ComputerWorld's latest issue contains another review of Second Life from a person making his first visit to the "virtual world." He gives one of the best overviews of his experience that I've seen and makes some good suggestions for companies who want to put a presence on Second Life. He concludes that most of the companies with a Second Life presence so far are pretty tentative and experimental, and the article includes pictures of his avatar all alone in rooms, streets, and buildings.

As trainers, I think this is missing part of the point of Second Life. The thing I find the most fascinating about SL isn't the virtual world itself; it's the technology that's behind it. Worlds that allow you to move around as an avatar in it is almost two decades old; I remember one called WorldsAway that I worked on at CompuServe. The difference in Second Life is that the world so closely mirrors "real life" and - here's the big one - the world is open for modifications, and you don't have to have a programming degree to build something for yourself in it.

Think of the whole Second Life phenomenon as simulations going to the next level. And some companies, like Forterra, are concentrating heavily on the amazing training possibilities this offers. Is it ready for prime-time, public use yet? Maybe not. But it's a glimpse at the future, and it's coming fast.

If you'd like to read a longer article about the training possibilities of virtual worlds, check out this excellent article in eLearn magazine: Another Life: Virtual Worlds as Tools for Learning.

How much useful learning video would be available via YouTube?

This is a bit of a continuation on my earlier post about YouTube for the corporate audience. Seth Godin had a very simple and important thought today about video: "People that would never read a 200 page book will happily watch a three minute video." That's certainly true (although I'd quibble with how many pages of a book you get per minute), and he links to some excellent examples of videos that are already available online that present powerful information.

I'm still not convinced, though, that these examples equate to corporate training needs. They certainly meet author and promotional training needs, but is it the same thing as putting an employee orientation video or software instructional clip on the open market? How many of our training needs could be meet by a YouTube that offers snippets of information, probably from the companies that own the software or tool being taught? Would it be a viable training resource?

YouTube for the corporate market?

I've been meaning to comment on this CyberNet article which says that YouTube will have a corporate version soon. CyberNet sees a use for it to allow employees worldwide to access a company's training videos, but I think that will only be a use if content can be protected by passwords, only allowed to be viewed within a company. I can't picture most companies, which are only slowly beginning to embrace Web 2.0 for public information, making their private corporate resources available to all.

There could be some interesting applications, though. Training and promotional videos that are meant for public consumption could be put onto a public clearinghouse. Everyone could view how to use IBM products or the latest products from Dell.

And no one would have to miss Wendy's 1980s training videos. Oh wait, we can see that part on YouTube now.

Do you see your company making use of a corporate YouTube?

Certifications with the Highest Market Demand

Certification Magazine's latest issue included an article on the certifications that currently have the most market demand. They seem to have used an HR and recruitment services firm for this list.

According to the article, the most important and popular certifications are:

• Microsoft MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer)
• PMP (Project Management Professional)
• Microsoft MCDBA (Microsoft Certified Database Administrator)
• Cisco CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate)
• CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional)
• Sun Java (this one wasn't for a specific cert except as proof of Java knowledge)

I think this has a huge hole that a CompTIA truck could drive through: it doesn't mention A+ or Network+, both of which are more popular with MindLeaders users than any other cert. A+ beats the others by a large margin, and CISSP isn't near the top of the lists with our users. I agree with MCSE, Java, and PMP on this list, but I'd put A+ at the #1 spot.

What are your thoughts on the list - what's missing, what's the biggest of the big?

Microsoft announces lots of product updates

For those of us who keep tabs on upcoming IT training needs, Microsoft is planning another blitz of new products for next year like they did this Spring with Vista & the 23-product Office package. Big IT needs may be ahead for Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, and SQL Server 2008:

Microsoft announced at its partner conference on July 10 that it will launch Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 together in a single launch on February 27, 2008, in Los Angeles.

Harnessing New Technologies for Learning

I read a very interesting article about the ways that Accenture is using Web 2.0 technologies for their employee development and learning.

Some of my favorite points:

Rippert looked at YouTube and wondered why a teenager can find a an amateur video on the site quickly and easily, but finding a video of a corporate presentation in a business's archives is next to impossible if you don't know the exact title of the file.

Other capabilities Accenture has in beta testing now include virtual employee training, using technology similar to that of the much-talked-about Second Life, in which members can create personal avatars to move around and interact in a virtual world online.

And there will be wikis – co-operatively edited Web pages – to allow anyone in the company to publish material for internal use. “If you make it easy for your employees to publish information, they'll publish information,” says Rippert.

Some people may be quicker to adopt these new technologies than others, he admits. But his response to that is not to pressure employees to do so.

These are great examples of some ways to harness everyone's interest in the information that's important to them (and that will be slightly different for each person, even within the same department/team) to make the piles of training, documentation, and expertise that all organizations have in huge stockpiles more accessible and easier to find.

What methods does your organization use to help get interacting with and easily finding information? What's your next step going to be to improve that?

3 Rules for Great Web Conferences

I've run quite a few web conferences and have attended more than I can count. I love online meetings for allowing information and learning to be shared across geographic boundaries.

But. In-person presentations already have a hurdle to jump: the use and misuse of PowerPoint. Online presentations put much more focus on those PowerPoints (since that's the main and frequently only thing for people to look at), and introduce a second big hurdle: the web conferencing interface. Online meeting and conference sites have done a great job of making their interface pretty easy for the listener. Technical problems still plague the presenters, though. Audio connections and sound levels, the presentation of your slides, and managing the other bells and whistles (like polls and questions) are all things I've seen go wrong - sometimes all at once. Once the technical hurdles are passed, you have a fantastic teaching and sharing tool. But problems with those technical issues can drown out the very best information that might be shared.

So here are three golden rules for giving great web conferences.

1. Use video of the presenter if you can, even if it's only for a few minutes at the beginning. Most presenters don't care for this, and it introduces much more technical complexity (we can hope the future is going to make this much easier), but nothing substitutes for seeing real, live people at the other end of the computer. Rule 1b: If you can't show video, at least show a picture.
2. Have a killer presentation. Even if you do have video, most of the screen and focus will still be on your presentation slides. All the rules about PowerPoint (like "don't read slides full of text") are doubly true here. There are lots of books and web sites that will help with this if you're not confident in your presentation skills.
3. Practice, practice, practice. Try out the interface and your connection to your conferencing program. Get a few people together and give it a dry run, including all of the components that you'll use for the actual "show." Get the bugs worked out in advance.

What rules would you add or change? What have been your best and worst web or online conference and meeting experiences?