Fun Fun Fun!

"I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."
— E.B. White

The Black Bar glasses strike again: http://www.elfyourself.com/?id=1707052930. Thanks to Roxanne Darling (Beach Walks with Rox) for turning me on to this silly holiday fun. Note: Elf Yourself is spreading virally, so their server is a bit slow. If you get a server error, try again later. Or not, as your mood dictates. For more giggles check out JibJab including their musical year 2007 wrap-up.

Usually the holiday season is stressful with shopping and shipping to be done for both Chanukah and Christmas. This year, with more free time on my hands, it's been more fun and I'm enjoying making some of the gifts — using my quote collection for inspiration.

I generally have more fun reading online than writing. I'm up and running on Facebook now and hooked on Scrabulous and other applications. I poked around SecondLife some more and ended up becoming (even though I'm a newbie, just by getting there early) an officer of a new guild. It's hard to make myself stop and blog. I have the two next weeks off so I hope to catch up a bit on both learning SL and on my blog.

Strategies and Techniques for Implementing Social, Collaborative, and 3D Learning

"As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it."
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I'm belatedly posting some notes from an eLearningGuild online forum, Strategies and Techniques for Implementing Social, Collaborative, and 3D Learning, December 13 & 14. There were a lot of great and notable speakers from the cutting edge of technology-assisted learning. These are kind of long so I'm breaking them up into several posts, which will primarily be of interest to my colleagues in the learning professions.

The first morning the keynote was by Ray Jimenez, CEO of Vignettes for Training, Inc., who spoke on How to Integrate Social Networking and Collaboration to Impact Learning and Performance. He opened by talking about the variety of exciting tools that Web 2.0 provides (e.g. wikis, blogs, etc.) to help learners perform on the job and the common tension, in enterprise environments, between formal structured training and informal Web 2.0 learner-as-author content. He encouraged his audience of learning professionals to nurture the content creators among our learners. Ray posted some additional reference material to his blog including a free downloadable report with some case studies.

The next session I chose was Getting Serious about Virtual Worlds by Christian Renaud of Cisco. He cited some interesting figures from a study done by Pearn Kandola for Cisco on effective communications for geographically dispersed teams. For example, that it takes 4 times long to communicate a message electronically versus face-to-face. In SecondLife (SL), Cisco has a public-facing virtual campus, with meeting rooms, office space, a training area, and a theater-in-the-round. See http://blogs.cisco.com/virtualworlds for more information including virtual event dates. The major drawback of SL: there's no security system to speak of, so they don't use (or recommend) it for confidential information. The Virtual World Interoperability Forum working to de-risk this space.

Christian's thoughts on picking the right tool for an interaction:

• talk to a colleague quickly: telephone
• sensitive meeting: video conference if you can't meet live
• board meeting or close a big deal: telepresence
• pitch an idea: Webex
• disseminate your idea to 100s or 1,000s: webcast/podcast
• intimate gatherings with people you may not know: virtual worlds

One tool doesn't fit all, but they're working on integration between these so you can segue as needed. He said the best business use of a virtual world is when you have an intimate audience of people who can't meet physically and who either already trust each other or who don't require a strong trust relationship for the task(s) at hand.

He also mentioned the Mozilla-based Flock social web browser, and I'm giving it a try. But I'm so accustomed to automatically deleting all my personal info (cookies, etc.) when I exit a browser that it's hard to take the best advantage of its built-in features for social networking tools. I do like how easy it's to see status updates from Facebook and Twitter.

Also in attendance for this session was one of the other speakers: Tony O'Driscoll.

The next session I participated in was A New Model for Informal Learning: Communities 2.0 by Eric Sauve, founder and CEO of Tomoye Corporation and an author on trends and issues of Communities of Practice. Some highlights of his talk:

• Workplace trends driving social and informal learning
• Forrester says "More than 80% of adult learning takes place in informal settings outside the classroom, leaving only 20% for formal learning situations. In spite of the disparity between informal and formal learning in the workplace, corporations invest most of their budgets in formal learning."
• Eric noted we're just starting to find effective answers to this problem but it will change.
• Learners as source of content (YouTube-ification)
• Using the model of the Long Tail: while training organizations take on the low end, learners turn to their peers as the "Long Tail" of learning.
• The low end is time-consuming and costly, the long tail is fast, cost-effective, and validated by users.
• The learning environment, with best practices and supporting technology, becomes bottom-up and learner-centric.
• Validation Concerns
• For example: Are we creating value or compounding ignorance? Does the best or worst rise to the top?
• Collective Intelligence as a community validation method (The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki and Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs) says that a large group of peers is more effective at complex problem resolution than a small group of experts because in aggregate, the large group has more perspective and experience -- if you can capture it

• Linkages between formal and informal methodologies:

• as part of a blended learning strategy
• using community subject matter experts (SMEs) to validate courseware development
• point learning solutions for capacity building

• Biggest barrier to facilitating user-generated content: people untrained in instructional design have to think about how to be effective at generating learning content.

More on Strategies and Techniques for Implementing Social, Collaborative, and 3D Learning

"Potius sero quam numquam"
— Livy

Okay, I'm cheating and using a quote the second time (the first time was the English translation, "Better late than never" using Livy's Latin name, Titus Livius. But I couldn't find a more appropriate quote because I was going back over some notes from the eLearningGuild online forum Strategies and Techniques for Implementing Social, Collaborative, and 3D Learning, on December 13 & 14, 2007 and found more that I hadn't posted.

Intelpedia: Intel’s Use of Wikis to Support Collaboration and Enhance Learning
Josh Bancroft, Intel (his blog: http://www.tinyscreenfuls.com/)

Some of the best practices Josh used to get the internal Intel community to use the Intelpedia wiki (which probably work as well for other collaboration tools):

• Take advantage of naturally occurring opportunities to be a cheerleader for your wiki. When people complain about other collaboration tools in use, tell them why the wiki doesn't have that problem. When people email or mention a document, ask whether they'll put it on the wiki. And encourage others to advocate for the wiki so it's not just your voice.
• Any time you make a subjective rule about what can go in the wiki, i.e., what's "good enough" you dampen the wiki spirit that people own it and can make it what they want. Encourage people to submit useful stuff, organize it, garden to improve it and make it better.
• All information on the wiki has to be useful to at least one person, but because they want it to be encyclopedic, even vanity pages belong.
• All company security and IP policies apply to Intelpedia content as well, but they encourage employees to post everything that won't violate security concerns on the wiki so it will be encyclopedic. So as long as it's not breaking a rule they welcome people to add.

He talked a bit about why they chose Mediawiki ("it was good enough for Wikipedia") and recommended http://www.wikimatrix.org/ for comparing both open source and product wikis.

What the Heck is Facebook? Using Popular Tools to Train New Learners
Kristin Kahlich and Shon Bayer, Enspire Learning

Many companies have embraced elearning and sometimes simulations but not that many have embraced games, wikis, virtual worlds. Their main point was that employers and those responsible for developing training need to overcome those barriers, because the composition of the workforce will dramatically change as baby boomers leave the workforce and Generation Y enters.

Exploring Enterprise Virtual Worlds and the Metaverse
Ron Edwards, Ambient Performance, Ltd

A few highlights from Ron's talk ...

Corporate collaboration tool context: widely distributed teams, travel as both an expense and an environmental issue, recruit and retain 'digital natives'. Some of the solutions:

• Sun's mixed reality virtual conference room with both people on video and avatars online.
• Cisco partner network is now 3d; see http://blogs.cisco.com/virtualworlds/

Benefits of virtual seminars & conferences in SecondLife:

• You can see who's in the room in a richer way than a phone conference.
• Supports virtual breakout rooms.
• For security in enterprise collaboration you need a dedicated non-public platform or your own server inside a firewall.
• For identity,wrap 2D photos around avatar faces and wear avatar name tags.

For training, any one tool should be part of a mix:

• Virtual worlds are good for practice, role playing, sharing
• A blended approach might also include a SCORM trackable mobile procedural reference, hand-held tools with data analysis, decision support (e.g. Decisionability)
• Role playing is a sweet spot in virtual world collaborative learning.

There was some discussion of accessibility and the areas in which virtual worlds aren't there yet -- especially for those with visual impairment. One group had success with those who have hearing impairment. Training in a virtual collaboration environment can be more accessible than, for example, a ropes course. He showed an example of a real course that required learners to wade waist-deep across a stream.

In his opinion, the ramp up time to learn to use a virtual world application is about 20 minutes, less if you're a gamer. My own experience in SL has been that it takes longer to become either comfortable or proficient.

One of the attendees says there are some good YouTube videos by Torley Linden on building and getting around in SL. A bunch of us shared SL avatar names and got some momentum for an eLearning Guild presence in SL. There are lots of education activities in SL including AECT in SL (Association for Educational Communication and Technology).

Check out Wolf Quest, a learning-based game released by the Minnesota Zoo in December, as an of applying these tools for learning. And one more link of interest: Serious Games Institute, UK.

Ron feels virtual worlds will dramatically change the way we work and interact, but today's virtual worlds are like the horseless carriages that were the first automobiles. Gartner says 80% of us will be using virtual worlds by 2011.

Tempus fugit

"Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."
— Groucho Marx

It's been three weeks since my last post. Well, I started some, but never finished. After I got home from my Thanksgiving travels, I finally got a badge for the ABI office and my own login. That made it easier to go in and work, so I've been spending a lot more time there. I helped TechLeaders program manager Kim McLeod put together materials for two back-to-back workshops, and started assisting with management of the online communities in Facebook and LinkedIn.

Last Tuesday and Wednesday I participated in the second of those workshops: Senior TechLeaders: Leading Across Cultures. There was an amazing group of accomplished and experienced women in the room. ABI Research Director Caroline Simard blogged her notes on the workshop:

• Senior TechLeaders: Leading Across Cultures
• Senior TechLeaders Day 2: Dr. Francine Berman
• Senior TechLeaders: Remaining Technical while Becoming an Executive
• Industry-University collaborations

Wednesday night KJ and I joined ABI staff, trustees and advisors at their holiday dinner. We had a wonderful time in such great company. I feel so privileged to be working with this group so committed to positive social change.

Then last Thursday and Friday I attended a great online forum from the eLearning Guild on Strategies and Techniques for Implementing Social, Collaborative, and 3D Learning. Inspired by Caroline I blogged my notes but have to clean them up before posting. It was a fun way to bridge my technical training background with my current explorations and ABI work with social media.

There was plenty of fun over the last 3 weeks. I was glad to get home and back on the trike, and KJ and I have been riding to the Y and around the neighborhood. Latkefest 2007 was fun as always. And one of my nieces sent a stunningly silly pair of Black Bars glasses, modeled here. These may prove useful, since Leaping Woman is still (for now, at least) an anonymous blog.