Monthly Archives: July 2010

Another e-learning debate at the Oxford Union

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Following last year’s inaugural debate on e-learning at the Oxford Union – the prestigious 186-year-old debating society – Epic, the equally well established (in terms of the e-learning industry) e-learning content provider, has been encouraged to try this format again.

So, on 6th October, Epic is sponsoring another Oxford Union debate – linking informal learning with learning technologies in the motion: ‘This house believes that technology-based informal learning is more style than substance.’

The speaker list includes informal learning guru Jay Cross; the author and academic Dr Alison Rossett, and Professor William Dutton of the Oxford Internet Institute.

Comment: In promoting this event, the eLN – another august body in the corporate e-learning world – describes this debate as being about ‘the oldest of topics’ (informal learning). I always thought that the oldest topics belonged to the oldest profession – which I always believed to be something completely different from e-learning.

No doubt these three august bodies – Epic, the eLN and the Oxford Union – will be able to prove me wrong on 6th October.

Business Buzz Word generator

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Brett Tudor’s recent plea to members of the ‘Simply Business’ group on LinkedIn – ‘Can anyone think of some examples of office slang, or phrases peculiar to the corporate environment? I’m doing some research on the subject for an article’ – prompted me to recall a ‘Buzz Word Generator’ that I was given when I started my first job in the training world.

 

The idea is that, in order to sound as if you know what you’re talking about, you choose any one word – at random if you like – from each of the three columns. There are ten words in each column, so you have a choice of a large number of permutations. If you’re clever, I was told, you can use this Buzz Word Generator for years and no one will ever know you don’t know what you’re talking about.

 

Why not try it for yourself? Here’s the Buzz Word Generator I was given:

 

Column 1                                            Column 2                                Column 3

Critical                                                 Operational                             Climate

Intrinsic                                                Validatory                                Orientation

Cumulative                                          Attitude                                    Profile

Accelerated                                         Developmental                        Situation

Linear                                                  Heuristic                                  Analysis

Simultaneous                                      Mathetical                               Plateau

Polyvalent                                           Coaching                                 Criterion

Diagnostic                                           Kinaesthetic                            Behaviour

Integrated                                            Reciprocal                               Programme

Adaptive                                              Structured                               Evaluation

 

Thus, you could talk about an ‘accelerated developmental situation’ but, equally, you could discuss a ‘cumulative coaching climate’ and so on. Have fun amazing – and confusing – your friends, enemies and business colleagues.

Reading speed rise in response to the information age

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Training specialist, Illumine, has found that its speed reading courses are not only helping to improve delegates’ reading speeds but also helping them overcome the stress of ‘information overwhelm’. The average reading speed of delegates attending Illumine’s speed reading courses in 1997 was 265 words per minute (wpm). According to data from more recent Illumine courses, the delegates’ average initial reading speed is now 297wpm.

 

Clive Lewis, Director of Training at Illumine and author of ‘The Extraordinary Reader’ commented: “In the last decade or so, the explosion of information in the form of email, the web and printed material has been phenomenal, so we were interested to see whether reading speeds had increased accordingly – to allow people to cope with this new pressure to acquire more information faster.”

 

Having identified that people were starting its courses with higher initial reading speeds, Illumine examined whether this had an impact on the improvement they experienced during the courses and discovered that, whereas the average improvement used to be from 265wpm to 695wpm, the average improvement now is from 297wpm to 839wpm.

 

“Interestingly, many of the individuals who already read 50% or even 100% higher than the average, tell us that they are still struggling to cope with the volumes that they are expected, or need, to read,” said Lewis. “However, our figures show that while, in 1997, less than 10% of delegates finished the course with reading speeds above 1000wpm, that number has now leapt to over 30%. For these individuals, information overwhelm should be a thing of the past.”

 

Illumine’s news prompted this response from e-learning guru, Phil Green, of both Optimum Learning and Onlignment: “I believe the capacity of people to pick out one or two nuggets of relevant or interesting information from a background of visual noise is a high order skill. It’s the same effect as hearing your name spoken from within a cacophony of conversation. Your reticular activating system gets excited. Those who are best at skimming and scanning text or imagery to spot the ‘nugget’ are faster and better at using search engines, more successful at self-study and probably better instructional designers and trainers too, since they are able to separate the ‘need to know’ from the ‘nice to know’, and keep on message.”
Comment: According to Illumine’s figures, if you had been on one of their courses, you should have read this story in about 30 seconds. If not, it’s likely to have taken you around 90 seconds. In either case, you won’t get that time again – which proves there’s an opportunity cost to gaining information, just as there’s an opportunity cost to everything in life!

Valuable and valueless

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According to a new report by PwC, most large organisations now have an articulated set of values or principles. Only one in ten respondents said that their organisation has none.

 

The survey found that 80% of respondents realise that consistent and frequent communication are important drivers in stressing these values, but only 63% state that this is done well by management.

 

Comment: Are corporate values mere window dressing or an important part of the business model? They could easily be both at once, of course, but, if they are the latter, how valuable are these values? Are they the glue which keeps the organisation’s workers together – motivated and engaged to do their best for the organisation through thick and thin? Or does merely ‘being’ the organisation – that is, operating day-to-day and trying to do the best in the circumstances – get in the way?

 

It might appear that 37% of organisations’ managements let the minutiae of ‘operating’ get in the way of them devoting their efforts to communicating corporate values effectively. In these cases, does that make these corporate values valueless?

 

Sadly, the only people who might consider these questions seriously are HR specialists – which, in ‘Main Board’ operating terms, might suggest the answer to the last question.

Five point plan for economic competitiveness through worker competency

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At the recent Training Transformation Symposium (at the Royal School of Military Engineering (RSME) in Chatham, Kent), Fabrizio Cardinali – CEO of Giunti Labs and chair of the European Learning Industry Group (ELIG) – presented a five point plan to ensure economic competitiveness through worker competency in the face of global economic challenge and change. Cardinali’s recipe for surviving the global economic crisis is to create a multi-disciplinary meeting point for learning industry creativity and innovation. In particular, he advocated:

  • Bridging skills and competency gaps by adopting competency-based qualifications which take account of the rapid changes in the skills and knowledge that today’s workers need (rather than rely on the rigid, formal structure of national qualifications currently in place).
  • Fostering personalised learning. He explained: “The traditional idea is that you produce average curricula to train average people. Today’s technology allows you to discover what each individual doesn’t know and needs to know – enabling you to design learning materials for that person and so speed up his/ her time to competence.
  • Using new media and knowledge distribution channels. Cardinali said: “Today’s technology enables us to use ‘massive individualisation’ – via the use of open and interoperable digital repositories of skills and competencies; qualification tests, and remediation contents, delivered via new media and knowledge distribution channels (including viral casting, such as You Tube, and social casting, such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Second Life) – to reach a targeted but widespread audience and deliver personalised learning plans and portfolios.”
  • Conceiving new pedagogical formats to motivate and engage each learner, via constructive, personalised self-development learning rather than ‘behavioural, prescriptive learning’.
  • Using open and interoperable technologies to enable the interchanging of standard components in learning design, development and delivery. This is done via e-learning service oriented architectures (SOAs) which separate learning management systems (LMS) and learning content management systems (LCMS) to produce PALs which are ubiquitous, wireless, broadband and mobile providing just-in-time services, empowering the personalise learning experience.

 

Comment: Cardinali gave an interesting and, at times, perceptive analysis of how (e)learning has been used and how it can – and should – be used in the future to keep Europe’s workers competent and competitive in tomorrow’s world.