What Goes in the LMS?

Recently I posted on Learning Materials asking the question -

What Goes in the LMS?

The responses via comments were truly fantastic. In fact, they were too fantastic to have them "buried" as comments. And I wanted to add some of my thoughts, so I'm post again on this topic.

Oh, and, as always, the answer is "it depends" - but let's try to come up with a few suggestions...

Should go in the LMS -

• Only finished content.
• Anything with per-learner, strict tracking requirements.
• Certification/Accreditation management: companies still need to know who went through which course and when, and what was his/her score at the end of it.
• Learning paths: some competencies require that content is presented in a specific order, an order that could be hardly reproduced in informal learning by learners without direct guidance.
• Content that's associated with the course content.

Should not go in the LMS -

• Content that doesn't need strict tracking.
• Content that needs fast access

Other thoughts -

• Put things in both places
• Build a rich web of connections to make sure they connect together

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More on ASTD Keynote

I know that Jon didn't create his post - ASTD TechKnowledge Comments in order to get me to post and link to him. But it certainly made my day when he said -

It was Tony Karrer (number one eLearning Blogger) who was awarded my five stars for his engaging Thursday morning opening speech that put David Pogue’s message in a context that made sense for attendees.

Considering that David Pogue is always highly entertaining and engaging - and plays the piano and sings at his presentations - I was somewhat worried having to be the next day's keynote following such a dynamic presenter. But in many ways, Jon is exactly right that David set the stage discussing Twitter and other aspects of social media. I was able to come in and discuss what that means for Concept Workers and for learning professionals.

If you want get a sense of what I discussed in the keynote - go to ASTD Follow-Up.

Thanks for the nice words Jon.

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Hot List - Second Half of January

As I was at ASTD last week, I missed doing my Hot List for the week. You can find out more about this in Hot List and Hot Last Week. So, I've compiled the list for roughly the second half of January.

Hot List - 1/17/2009 - 1/31/2009

Posts

1. Twitter as Personal Learning and Work Tool
2. How to Convert Your PowerPoint Presentation into an Elearning Course
3. Building a Learning Portal
4. YouTube videos inside Slideshare
5. Learning 2.0
6. Alternatives to Kirkpatrick
7. Wiki as repository for a virtual community
8. Wikipedia - tightening editing
9. Remote Collaboration
10. the Horizon report 2009 from Educause

Items

• HP Learning Center - free online software, business, marketing and IT classes for small and medium business

Keywords

• Social Media
• Work Skills
• Twitter
• Photoshop
• Captivate
• Adobe
• Google
• Articulate
• eBook
• Tools
• Demo
• ASTD
• TechKnowledge

Notes on the list.

• The posts come from the primary sources for this group. Other items come from other sources.
• Keywords are based on occurrences this week in addition to other social signals.

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Corporate Social Media Policies

There's a very interesting set of questions in the post Happy New Year! AND do you have opinions about social media governance? This is by an IBM employee, Jen Okimoto, who works in the domain of Web 2.0 and is asking about a very important issue ...

Access to and Governance of Social Media Tools in Corporate America.

This is a big issue. I've posted before a list of Corporate Policies on Web 2.0 and you can see some of the patterns that have emerged, but these don't necessarily help answer the questions being raise. I have some numbers in Web 2.0 Corporate Access that shows that a significant number of corporate policies are to shut down access to the tools.

Her questions are right on the mark. These are problems that I heard during my sessions last week as I mentioned in ASTD Follow-Up. Here are the questions she posted (with significant additional commentary).

1. How detailed should social media guidelines be?
2. When introducing social media into the workplace, how do we address HR concerns about reduced employee productivity?
3. How do you guide employees or manage employees in navigating the gray with respect to posting content that is or is not appropriate in the work environment?
4. What about content that falls squarely in the HR domain? What if employees use social media to publicize HR issues, or to gain "supporters" to their cause?
5. Do we have IBM or client examples of stats, use cases or any other stories that address these concerns?

This is an important discussion to be conducted. I hope you will visit her blog for details and post your thoughts.

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Social Job Seeker Resource

Yesterday, I was lamenting on the lack of resources available to people seeking jobs who don't know how to use social media. I had blogged about one technique in the past - Networking to a Job. But we realistically need a whole lot on this topic.

I just saw that Michele Martin has set up the Career Commons. Knowing Michele, this will be a fantastic discussion and resource. I don't have time right now to get directly involved, so I hope that people who participate will create resources that help provide practical advice for job seekers.

She has her first informal webinar for February 9, 2009 at 12 noon (EST). But she's limiting participation. I'd suggest you move quickly if you want to participate.

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ASTD Follow-Up

Last week at ASTD TechKnowledge, I did a keynote on Work Literacy and eLearning 2.0, an online Q&A Session for the Virtual Conference and a session on using Web 2.0 Tools for eLearning. You can find the handouts for the last session via TK09 Handouts.

I thought I'd capture some links and thoughts around these sessions.

Learning from Our Kids

In my keynote, I mentioned a Fourth Grade Wikipedia Update. Part of the beauty of this example is that I believe that through watching what's different with my kids, I can learn a lot about what's different. But I also see things that I feel need to be addressed. For example, we still teach Cursive Writing instead of Touch Typing to kids.

Improve your Work Literacy

I would highly encourage going through the recent series of posts all about Tools and Methods for Work and Learning:

• Work Skills Keeping Up
  
• Top-Down Strategy
  
• Better Memory
• Information Radar
• Processing Link Pages
• Network Learning
  
• Collaboration
• Twitter as Personal Work and Learning Tool
• Search
• Browser Short Cuts
• Work Skills Workshop

Keynote Links

I mentioned in Twitter Conference Ideas that I was sending messages and links during the keynote. Here is a larger set of links that go with the keynote. In fact, it almost tells the story of the keynote.

• Work Literacy
• eLearning 2.0
• Fourth Grader Wikipedia Update
• New Work and New Work Skills
• Work Skills Keeping Up?
• Knowledge Work Framework
  
• Tilde Effect
  
• Concept Worker
• Knowledge Work Not Separate from Learning
• Tool Set 2009
• Search
• Better Memory
• Network Learning
  
• Information Radar
• Remote Collaboration
• Common eLearning 2.0 Scenarios
• Preparing Workers for Web 2.0
  
• Work Skills Workshop

Take Action to Get Results

If you felt that you should be doing something after hearing this, I would highly recommend taking the following immediate steps:

1. I'll be doing posts periodically as follow-up to this session, so I'd highly recommend taking this as an opportunity to subscribe to my blog via email or an RSS Reader.
2. Review the post - Information Radar - and use the information there to set up your radar and start a new blog.
3. After you've started your blog then make sure readers can find you.
   

Fantastic Questions Raised

In the Virtual Q&A Session, there were a lot of really great questions being raised. I will try to use these as inspiration for upcoming posts. If you find these compelling and you post about them, please let me know so I can point folks there.

• How do you recommend we stay up-to-date with the changing technology?
• What resources would u recommend for a baby boomer 2 become proficient in blogging, social networking, wikis, etc?
• Or more correctly...how do you find them? There are so many to keep up with.from
• What are the top 5 things as a learning professional we need to learn immediately.
• I’ve seen X and am not seeing much participation.
• New Hire Blog - I love the idea of a new hire blog. Do you set it up so that only internal employees can view it?
• Are there any companies have done a good job in implementing the tools you described?
• Can you discuss the cultural implications of these changes? Can a highly regulated and slow to change Insurance Industry adapt these new methods of learning?
• Could you please discuss methods for encouraging users to use collaborative methods? I spend a lot of time developing SharePoint options for a department, but colleagues are more likely to spend their 2.0 time on personal FaceBook pages and then still email documents back and forth...
• Is there a simple way to convert info from a blog into an existing training program, such as a new employee orientation (so you can edit and update the orientation program as you discover things that need to be covered from your new employee's blogs)?
• How does this apply to non-knowledge workers? For example, ditch diggers?from
• Maybe the ditch digger is really a closet Social Networking expert.
• We will shortly move to Outlook 2007, with the RSS capability. I thought of introducing this tool to management by creating a blog on leadership topics with an RSS (as a useful illustration of its ability). I have no idea how to create an RSS. Any tips/resources?
• Can you share an emerging technology that you are excited about? Or do we have enough tools for now? Can you articulate what Web 3.0 or Learning 3.0 or Social Networking 3.0. would look like?
• I develop training for a call center. These workers are required to answer calls. However, this type of collaboration can help them learn and personally grow. Supervisors, Baby Boomers and Traditionals, do not believe or understand social networking. How do you get them, including thier supervisors, to use these collaboaration tools.
• even our millennials, who use these tools all day long--don't view them as work tools yet. Steep learning curve?

eLearning 2.0 Links

Wikis -

• Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-learning
• Class - http://collaborativelearning.pbwiki.com
• Conference - www.complexive.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
• WikiPatterns – http://www.wikipatterns.com

Social Bookmarking

• Wlning - http://delicious.com/tag/wlning
• Work Literacy - http://delicious.com/tag/workliteracy

Social Networking

• LinkedIn - www.LinkedIn.com
• Ning - http://workliteracy.ning.com/

RSS Readers

• Google Reader - http://www.google.com/reader
• Bloglines - http://www.bloglines.com

Blogging -

http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/2006/10/top-ten-reasons-to-blog-and-top-ten.html

Choosing an eLearning Authoring Tool -

http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/2006/09/personal-and-group-learning-using-web.html

Training Method Trends -

http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/2008/09/training-method-trends.html

eLearning 2.0 Examples -

http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/2008/09/examples-of-elearning-20.html

Web 2.0 Applications in Learning

http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/2008/03/web-20-applications-in-learning.html

Corporate Policies

http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/2008/05/corporate-policies-on-web-20.html

Wiki Patterns

http://www.wikipatterns.com

Additional Follow-Up

If you have further questions, thoughts, etc. please let me know via comments.

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Search

This is likely my last post in the Tool Set series. This post likely will be quite a bit different because I'm convinced that most people have used different search tools enough that they are pretty comfortable with their current search behaviors. My intent here is to possibly expand the options for the average knowledge worker to be able to search a bit better than they do today. This is by no means comprehensive and I welcome suggestions.

Other Than Google

My first recommendation is not to always default to Google. Yes, I personally use Google 95%+ for searching. But I do sometimes jump to other search engines. In all honesty, my bigger switch has been to leverage Networks and Communities (i.e., people search) than to leverage other search engines. That said, it's worth consulting resources such as:

• Choose the Best Search for Your Information Need - A wonderful list of different types of searches and tools that go along with that type of search.

For example, when you are new into a space, it is sometimes helpful to start with Clusty or Grokker. I happen to be a fan of facets as a mechanism to explore a space, especially when you are new to that space. For example, if you are brand new to authoring tools, you might do a search:

• http://clusty.com/search?query=authoring+tools
• http://live.grokker.com/grokker.html?query=authoring tools

The facets in Grokker (shown on the right) - help to give you a sense of the space. It also helps you refine your search before you go into Google. The fact is that searching for "authoring tools" is probably not quite what you want. You probably should be looking for "eLearning authoring tools" or "help authoring tools" or ...

At the other end of the spectrum is when you want a more comprehensive search and want to make sure that you've not missed important sites/pages. According to Search Engines / UC Berkeley -

Less than half the searchable Web is fully searchable in Google. Overlap studies show that more than 80% of the pages in a major search engine's database exist only in that database. Getting a "second opinion" is therefore often worth your time. For this purpose, we recommend Ask.com or Yahoo! Search. We no longer recommend using any meta-search engines.

That last comment is quite interesting - and while I'm not sure why, I personally don't use meta search engines, but I will periodically check other search engines such as Ask and Yahoo to see what they have to say on a topic.

While I'm on the topic of alternative search engines, I definitely need to remind everyone about Google Scholar and Google Book Search . One of my favorite searches is to do a book search and include only those books where I can see preview or full view (via advanced search).

Other Resources

• Internet Archive - Way Back Machine - use this to get back to any page in the past.
• Search Engines and Search Tutorials - Fantastic set of links.
  

Evaluating Information

I'm not going to spend time on this, but at some point, I need to create a good cheat sheet or set of mental models that would help us identify what is good quality content. Obviously, we do this a lot. You search and then filter through to figure out what might be helpful.

• Evaluation Internet Sites Tutorial
• Evaluating Quality on the Internet
• Evaluation of Information Resources

Search Basics

Some basic, introductory material.

• A Basic Tutorial on Searching the Web
• Internet Search Strategies from UC Berkeley

Google Operators

• Google Guide
• Google Operators
  
• Google Cheat Sheet

In terms of the specific Google operators that I use quite a bit:

• - Helps me get rid of stuff that doesn't apply.
• OR - When several terms apply.
  
• .. as a quick date search. In other words, 2007 .. 2009 for recent materials. There's a better date range via advanced search.
• filetype: I often use this to find examples. filetype:ppt - Often use OR or the "~" to expand your search when looking for examples can be a good trick.
  
• site: I use this to search a particular site because most site searches are not that great.
  
• inurl: I use this to search gov, edu type sites.

It's not that many operators, but it often surprises me the percentage of people who use Google all the time and don't know these operators, or don't know where they apply.

More on Boolean searching and search operator usage:

• Power Searching for Anyone
  
• Boolean Search Interactive Tutorial
• Boolean Tutorial

Image Search

I do a fair amount of searching for images. Primarily I use:

• Google Image Search
  
• Flickr

But there are a lot of sources out there, especially if you need royalty free sources:

• Stock Photo Image and Other Media Sources
• Free Sources of Photos and Images
• Copyright Friendly Image Sources

Other Posts in the Series

• Tools and Methods 2009
  
• Work Skills Keeping Up
  
• Top-Down Strategy
  
• Better Memory
• Information Radar
• Processing Link Pages
• Network Learning
  
• Collaboration
• LinkedIn Guide for Knowledge Workers
• Twitter as Personal Work and Learning Tool
• Search
• Browser Short Cuts
• Work Skills Workshop

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