Epic show report

Learning Technologies 2006

Report by Donald Clark, Epic

The lifts only went to three floors but had guys on stools in the corner to press the buttons for you. How weird is that? This feeling of ‘what happened to the technology bit’ was to resurface in my mind several times over this two-day exhibition and conference. However, it was a fun and informative two days. The e-learning world does have a solid core of good people trying to do good things.

Over the two days the talks seemed to fall into future, present and past; the future through ‘informal learning’, the present ‘blended learning’ debate and the more dated ‘learning’ topics. I’ll try to look at the conference through these three lenses.

Future – Informal learning
The ‘informal learning’ theme was the direct subject of several talks but also popped up in other themed talks, as well as the best of the plenary sessions (Charles Jennings of Reuters). It is clear that this is the topic of the day. Informal learning has crept up on e-learning through google, open source, messenger, podcasting, blogs, wikis, MMOGs and a dozen other forms of knowledge creation, sharing and searching. Far from being something for the future it’s big, it’s here, and here to stay. I am, of course, biased here, as this was also the subject of my talk.

Reuters rocks….
At last a speaker with the breadth, depth and honesty to show us something interesting, well researched and new. Charles Jennings, CLO at Reuters, does the reading and knows his stuff. He doesn’t wing it. This was a measured and deeply informative talk. His focus: performance. Elton John is no great musician, he doesn’t even write his own songs – he’s just a superb performer. Same with Bob Dylan – crap voice – great performer. The shift has been from training to learning and from skills acquisition to performance.

Quoting Jerome Bruner, the constructivist (see profile on my blog), that ‘our world is others’, he explained that in our modern age we should NOT be training people to hold large amounts of knowledge in their heads. A lot of knowledge has a short lifespan and is unstructured. Robert Kelley, at Carnegie-Mellon, has researched the degree to which we need retained knowledge to do our jobs:

• 1986 – 75%
• 1997 – 15-20%
• 2000 – 8-10%

He then drew from McKinsey Quarterly to show that “70% of all US jobs created since 1998 require judgement and experience…and now make up 41% of the labour market in the US…complex interactions typically require people to deal with ambiguity…shift from transactional to tacit interactions require companies to think differently about how to improve performance”.

Finally, from Jay Cross, who recommends that we funnel knowledge away from tacit workers and support them with workflow learning and tools. In short, this means informal learning, the subject I also spoke about – there seems to be a theme emerging here. Informal learning is less expensive, better received and embeds better in organisations.

In Reuters he had to swing things away from their rather messy traditional model. This meant detailed performance analysis, alignment of priorities with the business, as well as being nimble and receptive to new ideas and change. He had a real go at the old, but still all too common, reactive training department that simply delivers courses when they’re asked for. His solution - get reach through technology. Ban the word ‘training’ and adopt ‘learning’. See yourselves as ‘agents for change’. Most important of all ‘look below the waterline at the 80% of learning that is informal’.

There are also signs of some innovative work around wikis, on technology transfer, to collaboratively capture and share knowledge among Reuters’ 3500 technical workers, who were in 60 cities, now only 20 and falling. The Chair had never heard of the word ‘wiki’ – which led me to reflect, do people who attend technology conferences actually use the internet?

He has a long way to go at Reuters but if anyone is going to get them to this brave new world, it’s Charles. At last someone who understands learning and technology!

Informal learning – why is it being ignored?
This is a brief summary of my own talk. Informal learning is all a question of balance. We spend almost all of our training budgets on formal learning, yet we learn most of what we learn through informal learning. A lifetime’s learning will be mostly informal, especially pre-school, college/university, in the workplace and in retirement. School is the only real period of intense formal learning. Focusing on work, the landmark study by the Education Development Center (EDC) in 1997 funded by the US Department of Labor and the Pew Charitable Trusts showed that every 1 hour of formal training was matched by 4 hours of informal learning.

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Infromal learning is driven by networks. These networks fall into two camps:

Informal learning Level 1: Word of mouth
Word-of-mouth is face-to-face conversations. These are encouraged through:

• Open office structure
• Proximity and line of sight seating
• Non-departmental seating
• Staff area with relevant magazines
• Budget for staff get-togethers
• Brown bag lunches
• Book club/Budget for books on Amazon

Informal learning Level 2: Word of mouse
Here we have the use of computer networks, internal (behind the firewall) or external (the web).

Word of mouse workflow informal learning techniques include:

• Skills database or profiles
• Intranet with workflow structure and linked learning
• Online quality system linked to workflow
• EPSS software

Word of mouse web informal learning techniques:

• Google
• Email
• Instant messenger
• Discussion boards
• Wikis
• Blogs
• Podcasting
• Syndication
• Massive Multiplayer Online Games

Wiki software is cheap (often free) software allows you to build knowledge bases where the knowledge is built by the users themselves. Check out Wikipedia. We also have manager blogs, expert blogs, employee blogs, learner blogs and teacher blogs. There’s also group blogs. These online diaries are now a flourishing area of knowledge sharing. Podcasts as a channel for learning, have some significant, and in some cases unique, advantages. Listening is instinctual (reading is not), gets round illiteracy, gets round dyslexia and is a cool and mobile medium (MP3). Then Massive Multiplayer Online Games; Second Life, has been used for patient learning: Aspergers/autism. Other learning experiments in Second Life include; Health emergency learning: pandemic flu, Finance training: Wells Fargo and political education.

Contact us for the slides in full: marketing@epic.co.uk

And check out more informal learning stuff on my blog:
http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/

Case study: BBC
Gareth Jones from the BBC showed a long series of his favourite informal learning sites, including many from within the BBC. He instantiated my theory with some truly fascinating examples. What’s heartening about Gareth and his colleagues at the BBC is their willingness to give things a go. Perhaps this is a feature of working in a creative media company. He doesn’t claim that this has been easy – but is a clear advocate for informal learning.

100% staff turnover!
Let’s try some word association – Whitbread. Did you immediately think of beer? Well, they sold the brewery years ago and now specialise in restaurant chains. David Goodson cheerfully admitted that, in one of their businesses, they had (past tense) over 100% staff turnover in a year. Yes, this is both possible and true. In a well presented case study, accompanied by audience interaction demo, he hit the perfect pitch with a short food hygiene e-learning programme that was simple, interactive, relevant and entertaining. This was an off-the-shelf programme from Creative Learning Media. He used PC tablets, one per outlet (40-100 staff) with data gathered three times a week to a LMS. Each outlet has a champion and all of the training is done in worktime. With 20,000 trained, 91% completion rate and 87% preferring this type of learning, and reduced costs for training, this was an excellent case study. Short, sweet and a good end to the conference.

Research? I think not
My suspicions were first aroused when I saw that the PowerPoint slides all had a flipchart on the right hand side. This is clearly a talk by someone who, maybe unconsciously, equates learning with residential training centres, classrooms, flipcharts and the smell of felt tip pens. Sure enough, that seems to be what Ashridge is, largely.

The talk, by the Head of Learning at Ashridge, was billed as the ‘new face of e-learning’, with research to show where we’re going. It wasn’t. There was no research, no research methodology and, to be honest, it was a thinly disguised piece of marketing for Ashridge. I don’t mind organisations explaining or even selling themselves, but this was under false pretences. I disagreed with almost everything he said but that wasn’t hard as very little was meaningful. There was one surreal moment when he claimed that, “I know of no organisation where training takes place in work time”. The Chair, smelling revolt, asked the audience and almost every member of the audience contradicted the statement.

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Present –Blended learning
I was a little sceptical of the blended learning sessions, but this proved unwarranted. It is certainly the case that blended learning has at least made some move beyond the disconnected delivery of classroom or e-learning courses. What it hasn’t done is move us much beyond simple models, where formal methods are put shoulder to shoulder, with informal techniques still largely ignored.

Clive tells it as it is – or should be
Clive Shepherd told it as it is and sees blended learning as a useful motif, not something to be scorned or ignored. His analysis was spot-on. Blended learning is fine in theory, but falls down in practice. Knocking down the single methods of delivery – classroom, e-learning and on-the-job, he sees more sophisticated blends as the answer. As usual Clive was solidly pragmatic and has his own ‘book of blends’ to make his point. Clive has tons of experience across all forms of training delivery and I can’t think of anyone in the industry better equipped to talk on this subject.

At last some technology
Richard West of BAE who gave a fast-paced run down of BAEs one-stop-shop for knowledge and learning – a sort of blended portal. The idea was to build learning into work and practice and a very fine job they’ve done. With a focus on core competences (perhaps a little too much) they’ve built a system that is individualised to each employee.

The ROI figures were impressive:

• 90% reduction in retrieval time
• ROI after 7 months
• Over £7 million saved on desktop relief
• Over 39,000 registered users
• 28,000 hits per day

Good presentation, content rich and – and what a surprise, some technology.

Past – Learning
The rest of the conference covered a range of traditional, and sometimes hackneyed training topics. We had the usual calls to be ‘heard at board level’, and pleas for more ‘evaluation’. These talks tended to completely ignore ‘technology’ and one wonders why they were presented at a ‘Learning technologies’ conference.

Everybody happy?
The big hitter on Day 2 was Jack Phillips, the evaluation expert. This was the usual run through of why and how evaluation should be done, the Kirkpatrick/Phillips way. One can read Jack’s books and if one buys into the Kirkpatrick model, supplemented by his ROI theory, then fine. But we have enough evidence, I suspect, to see why this approach has failed, and continues to fail, in practice. The bottom line is that training still struggles to prove its worth and Kirkpatrick was guilty of promoting a ‘happy sheet’ culture (albeit unintentionally) backed up by a complex four-level model that is too complex, too long-winded and too expensive to implement. Nevertheless, as an introduction to the need and methods of evaluation, this was fine.

IBM – all talk no stand
The first plenary, from Mary Kay Vona of IBM, was a standard IBM talk, basically a call for the use of on-demand services from IBM. I always feel sorry for senior managers from very large IT companies (did I really write that), as they clearly have to toe the line and can’t afford to go off-message. Perhaps they’ve given up on their promise two years ago to dominate the e-learning market. It is now clear that dinosaurs do not give birth to gazelles. I tried to find the IBM stand – it wasn’t there and I wasn’t surprised.

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And the organisation yawned….
I thought I’d stumbled into another conference. The VP of HR for Oracle (Europe and some other places) gave a talk about (you’ve guessed it) getting to the top table. There’s an air of desperation about this theme. Like dogs at a medieval banquet HR and training scuttle around looking up for some attention, only to be thrown a few bones and residual budgets. This was a LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES conference, a fact that he missed entirely. As he said, “people are not lining up to take courses…..training lacks relevance…the organisation yawns…worthless happy sheets”. I wonder why? Dry talk – nothing new – same old stuff. This seemed like standard speech that we hear delivered at every HR conference – this was the wrong talk at the wrong conference.

Strange but true
A very weird talk by Phil Green on embedded and workflow learning. I was looking forward to this, as there’s a large movement around the topic in the US with electronic performance support and task-based e-learning, but Phil also appeared to be at the wrong conference. He showed us a cork hanging from his garage roof to stop (his wife!) hitting the back wall with the car, a device for pulling off your Wellington boots, a photograph of blisters on feet to remind people not to wear new boots, a photo of people standing on one leg (apparently teachers have to do this in the company of their spouses), so that they only talk about work for as long as they can stand on this one leg. His point, which was reasonable, is that good design often eliminated the need for training. Fine, but let’s all scream in tandem, “this is a LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES conference!”

End
Nice touch by the organisers to give everyone an iPod, but a bit mean to exclude the speakers. Good conference, and speaking to many of the exhibitors, they got their leads. I met loads of people and, as usual, the chats in the coffee shop (too few tables) and evening outings were great. Olympia is an awkward place to get to, the architecture of the entrance, lifts and floor is truly bizarre, but the organisers did a good job. One tip – weed out the HR speakers who don’t want to talk about how technology works in organisations. There’s loads of other conferences that deliver bucket loads of HR stuff.

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