Epic show report

Elliot Masie's Learning 2005

Orlando, Florida, November 2005
Report by Donald Clark, Epic

Elliot succeeds, despite himself

Billed as the un-conference, Elliot Masie was clear, ‘telling ain’t training’. Elliot assured us there would be fewer talks from the podium, fewer presentations and less PowerPoint. Apart from Elliot that is! He then talked at us for three solid days. Correction – he proceeded to talk down to us. For the entire conference he sped around on a Segway (that two-wheeled failed gyroscopic vehicle) stopping en route to say a few words from a foot above the ground to his many admirers. Elliot’s really a preacher so a mobile pulpit was perfect.

At one point (I swear this is true) he sped into the hotel bar on his Segway and made straight for our table. He looked down on us, we looked up at him, he asked for one of our nachos, ate it, then seeing that we weren’t playing disciple, rotated 180 degrees and sped off. Weird or what?

To be fair his podium talks were OK, if at times a little wayward. He’s an engaging guy and can hold an audience. His new concept (Elliot always has a new concept) was ‘Nano Learning’. I sat through this talk and would like to have been able to explain this breakthrough, but I have no idea what he was talking about. As Elliot loves audience participation, he asked us all to turn to our colleagues at our table and ask ‘How small could a piece of learning be?’ One wag on our table decided that, in Elliot’s case, this would have to be at the level of one or two neurons, but even this isn’t ‘nano’. Nano means 10 -9 and nanotechnology is the operation of man-made entities at the cellular and molecular level. Jay Cross’s contribution to nano-learning was a rather good joke.

Two molecules are walking down the street. One says, ‘I’ve lost an electron’. The other says, ‘Are you positive?’

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At some points we thought Elliot had lost it. The first was when he was interviewing the former head of the US Girl Scouts. In describing the prescient introduction of a badge for computer studies years back, she suggested that Elliot was one of the few people at the time who had lots of computers in his house. ‘Yes’, he replied, ‘I had quite a few girl scouts round my house in those days. That was before I was married of course.’ Wow! The second was during his encounter with Malcolm Gladwell, when he asked whether he had ever considered turning his books into games (The Tipping Point and Blink). Gladwell looked at him and said ‘No’ in the way that a teenager says no when grilled by their parents. The third was when four kids took to the stage with the excellent Nick van Dam the 6’ 7” Deloittes CLO. He was promoting a great charity called ‘e-learning for kids’. Elliot introduced us to a particularly dull video (really an animated PowerPoint), but the kids were having none of it and proceeded to fidget, dance and generally muck about. More mucking about was precisely what the conference needed at this point.

We could certainly have done without the Disney characters cavorting about the conference hall. There were no kids there and the average age looked over forty. This was just childish. The night out to MGM was also a washout (literally – it poured) and for those of us who have been to Techlearn many times, a little repetitive. You can only take the Tower of Terror so many times. I chose the European alternative – a night out at a Chinese restaurant, the highlight being the CEO of Matchett Training flicking open a rather large crispy duck pancake roll thinking it was a hot towel.

Malcolm Gladwell

The star speakers were Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point and Blink) and Stephen Johnson (Emergence and Everything Bad is Good for You). Both are good public speakers who have lots to say and can hold an audience.

It would have been much better to let them speak than interrupt them with inane questions. Elliot had rigged up a screen-based atavar called Avery – as in ‘Every’ learner - geddit? No – neither did I. This backfired on Gladwell, who, when faced with what was clearly a huge electronic glove puppet, was having none of it. When asked by the atavar what was he was thinking, he sceptically noted that he couldn’t get past the fact that what was coming out of its mouth didn’t match the lip movement. The atavar beat a hasty and welcome retreat.

He had some interesting, if fragmented thoughts:

• Scrap staff rooms in schools – dens for griping
• Don’t set up steering committees – they don’t work
• Experts are quick decision makers – use them
• Driver education will reduce accidents, not better cars (let them crash)
• Cluttered desks are great – they’re not cluttered for the desk owner
• Don’t give people more options on pensions and health – they’ll do less

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Stephen Johnson – Everything Bad is God for You

‘Games are chronically misrepresented’ said Johnson, ‘the median age is 29/30, most games (8/10) are not shoot ‘em ups and adults have completely the wrong idea of what kids are doing and achieving through gaming. He told a story of his seven year old nephew asking a suggestion when he was stuck in Sim City. Johnson had built his city but couldn’t get his industrial area to work. It kept burning down. The kid suggested lowering the business tax and it worked.

Games are hard, complex, ramp up in line with your skill level and are full of decision making. This is high-level thinking and people are doing it for fun. Shouldn’t we be glad that they’re playing games and not slobbing out in front of TV. You see kids playing chess and you’re impressed. We should be similarly impressed when we see them playing computer games. The mental workout is extreme. People like exploration when combined with reward. And don’t imagine that women are not involved. Online poker and bridge games are often dominated by women players, especially in the 40-60 age group.

• GOOGLE makes us zoom in and out, not browse
• Epcot closer to 19th than 21st century – would seem insane to a seven year old

I would have loved to have heard more from Johnson, but you can turn to his excellent book ‘Everything Bad is Good for You’ where he looks at the real revolution in games through the Flynn Effect and other studies. This is a ‘must read’ for anyone who worries about their kids playing games and others who want to engage in the debate about games and learning.

Vice-Admiral Moran

He started by making the huge political error of confusing Al Queda with the whole of the insurgency in Iraq. That wasn’t his only wrong-headed use of language. He repeatedly called his training centres ’schoolhouses’. Is there any better way to turn off new recruits? Join the navy and go back to school! He then described the Navy in terms of ‘bottom line’ and ‘shareholder value’. I may be wrong but Bush hasn’t privatised the US Navy. Yet!

He redeemed himself by making some excellent points about how the military world has changed. His example, of responses to roadside bombs in Iraq, was spot on. This is a cat and mouse game where each side is learning how to outdo the other every seven days or so. It’s a dynamic learning situation where failure to learn means death. Read the full article on the way in which these guys have become front-line troops in Iraq in Wired Magazine this month or online at www.wired.com

The efforts they’ve made (but remember that the US military has nearly 500 billion budget) are of real interest. Elliot has a good and instructive story about a pilot he had met on an aircraft carrier. When Elliot asked him, ‘How do you stay alive?’, he replied, ‘I do it by failing safely’. This is a world in which e-learning and simulations is the norm. As the Admiral says, ‘Interactive training and simulations - absolutely the right way to go’.

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Franz Bax

Franz, in true CIA style stood up, said nothing, and stood back down again. What a waste of time. It’s surely better not to turn up than to turn up and say nothing. His joke, ‘People think we know everything and therefore don’t need training’, was a good start but his words on just starting wikis in the CIA and the CIA University were empty vessels. Read Wired for more insight on all of this. This was a really good opportunity to discuss stuff that’s already in the public domain, such as the teaching of Arabic, the impact of the web on intelligence, wikis and blogs in the intelligence world. If this guy’s in charge of learning at the CIA, then no wonder the intelligence is way off the mark.

John Abeley on healthcare

As CEO of Boston Scientific he explained the general scepticism that CEOs have about training. He made a telling point about not being sure about training, or even learning. He thought that other language was needed – but his alternative ‘inculcate’ was a bit disappointing. He saw that learning is complex and mixed up with culture, politics, vested groups and customers, strongly recommending The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki and The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen.

Universities and Government can’t hoard knowledge anymore. Medicine was a ‘closed system’ This worked up to a point but is no longer sustainable, as it is no longer working. Doctors have been running the show for too long. Gladwell interjected with the anti-American view that Government should run healthcare (remember I’m a Canadian – he added). The US audience was strangely silent at this point.

In terms of e-learning he was clear about the importance of simulations, Doctors, he argues, will become like pilots with much of their training and certification based on simulators. This is now spreading from procedure to procedure. Astounding fact – 30% of US students don’t graduate from high school - it’s 70% in new Orleans. Learning needs ignition.

In another session on Healthcare and learning he wonderfully sidelined the speakers, who were really only interested in telling people about their rather dull LMS implementation, and literally took over the session. This was as it should be. He broke the rules, as Elliot advised, and the session was all the better for it. Once again he focused our thoughts, not on the technology, or top-down training through an LMS and content, but on culture and the need to get groups to recognise teamwork and overcome their group obsessions. This is particularly important in health which is now multi-disciplinary, yet hidebound by vested interest groups.

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Frances Hesselbein

Frances was a sharp cookie but her stories about her time managing the US Girl Scouts, although interesting, lacked detail and relevance and substance. She’s really wrapped up in the ‘cult of leadership’ which has swept through the training world over the last few years. Thankfully it’s showing signs of receding. This was really one of those ‘friends of Elliot’ moments, where we had to sing Happy Birthday (twice) with two standing ovations. It’s the cult of celebrity. As we Europeans didn’t know who she was, we were a little puzzled. She was, however, charming.

Marshall Goldsmith

Marshall is an ubercoach, according to Elliot, and it all got off to an odd start as Elliot tried to interview him and he insisted on ignoring Elliot and speaking to the audience. Marshall claims to be a Buddhist but his incessant Cheshire cat grinning, insistence on happiness as the ultimate mental state and barking out positive thinking platitudes at the audience was closer to Jimmy Swaggart than Buddha. Whatever happened to the stilling of desire? The positive thinking industry in the US simply gobbles up religious beliefs like happy pills. When we were asked to walk about and ask five strangers to suggest tips for improving our lives I had to get some fresh air.

Did the un-conference work?

OK, enough of these anecdotes. To be fair, Elliot is what Gladwell would call a maven, an insatiable collector of other people’s ideas. He usually gets into a tangle when he comes up with his own and doesn’t really do debate and discussion.

However, he did a good job in limiting the amount of PowerPoint (one slide only) and encouraging discussion. There were podcasts prior to the conference, Wikis galore, a piece of software that matched you with like-minded colleagues in a clever scatter-diagram, also a huge Learningland room full of wall sized posters for learning graffiti and get-togethers. He really did try, and mostly succeeded.

A symptom of this ‘near success’ were the interactive touchpads every attendee received on registration. We were promised lots of audience participation through polling, yet the polling was relatively rare, usually trivial and often merely a vehicle for Elliot’s jokes. This was a lost opportunity.

We could also have done with less award presentations. These are largely Elliot bestowing favours. They were dull and we learnt nothing about why they were deserved. CNN won (was Al Jazeera a contender?). The US Navy won – well they need a win these days. The parcel guys at UPS won for – well, delivering parcels.

Perhaps it needs another year to gel. This was a brave attempt. Conferences are rarely more than a few huge classroom experiences in the main hall followed by lots of smaller classroom sessions in breakout rooms. This tried to be different. Elliot just needs to step back a little and let others do their thing. He needs to practice what he preaches – or better still, simply stop preaching.

On the whole the discussion sessions were better than the sponsored sessions and the informal learning sessions on wikis, blogs, podcasting, RSS and mobile learning were way better than the old-hat classroom, LMS and standards sessions.

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Should you go next year? Yes. Elliot still has the ability to bring people together. He’s really on to something here. It just needs some editing and tuning. Get rid of the Disney characters, sponsored sessions and awards. Learningland needs to be in a smaller room with more incentives to encourage discussion. It made me think that conferences full stop are the problem. Dressing them up as debate, discussion and collaborative events may not be enough to stop their decline.

The Big Idea - Informal learning

The big idea this year was - in two words - informal learning. The general (I almost said formal) debate on informal learning was lively. Jay Cross delivered a PowerPoint-free session that set the tone of the debate and other related sessions struggled with the idealist desire to control all learning with top-down, command and control interventions with the realistic view that most learning doesn’t actually work this way.

You could say this ‘informal’ stuff matches the recent fuss around Web 2.0, namely the idea that the web has moved towards being what Berners-Lee and others had always wanted a media rich, social platform. Web 2.0 is about participation and wikis, blogs, blikis, RSS, atom, podcasts have provided the accessibility that is necessary to participate.

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In another session on informal learning, Dick Sethi and Larry Israelite were exposed to the great dilemma in this field. It was an interesting session in terms of both form and content. On form, the two discussion leaders gave us their background and views then tried to structure the session around the old ‘break into five groups’ and discuss our set questions format. By this time the audience were in control of the debate and took it down their own road, so we never did get to the breakout groups to answer the set questions. We came up with our own questions and tried to answer those as one group. This was great and to be fair the presenters rolled with it and were positive about us not following their format. They were good guys.

The discussion first explored the distinction between formal and informal learning. The mistake is to think of these as logical opposites, or mutually exclusive terms like true and false. They are scalar terms like hot and cold – a matter of degree. Intention and non-intention is an interesting distinction. Jay Cross had a nice metaphor – formal is like taking the bus, informal is like riding a bike. The danger with this debate is that it takes us down the fruitless search for dictionary definitions. These large terms always escape such capture.

We then got into a debate about whether the informal side is a ‘learning’ or ‘training’ issue at all. HR folks tend to want to supply things and control content. Informal techniques work because they are not controlled or supplied. The audience split into trainers who saw themselves as controlling ‘informal’ learning and those who had a more liberal view of this brave-new-world.

One HR specialist insisted that informal learning should be a function of ‘personal development plans’. To be blunt – no. Sophisticated learners do not know in advance where, how and even why they need to learn. There needs to be some slack in the system. People are not commodoties who need to follow the plan. This was one of those experiences that stick with you, not so much for the content but the experience. By living the informal experience you gain more. That is why experiential learning is a frontline issue. AARs (After Action Reviews) were suggested as a sort of crossover for formal and informal – a good and illustrative idea.

Interestingly, the sessions that were almost empty were the top-down, LMS and vendor-driven sessions (many who ignored the no PowerPoint rule), while the informal sessions on millenials, podcasting, wikis and blogs were so full that people were being turned away. The rooms were literally heaving with people.

"The future is here; it's just not evenly distributed yet." William Gibson

Wikis and blogs

The session on Wikis and Blogs was superb with an interesting mix of experts and novices. The novices asked good basic questions, like ‘Can you show me a Wiki?’ and the experts gladly imparted their knowledge. We heard from real practitioners how wikis and blogs could be used for learning and the applause at the end was heartfelt. Everyone gained from this experience and it was a good example of what Elliot was trying to achieve. As informal learning techniques, these wonderful internet inventions show great promise.

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Podcasting

Another session on podcasting by two Microsoft guys was inspirational. They destroyed two myths in one go; first the myth that technical people are not good communicators, second that Microsoft are an uncaring and unsharing organisation. True they do have the anti-competitive lobby breathing down their neck, but these guys were magnificent. They made the session truly interactive, extracted the expertise from those in the audience with experience and answered loads of questions in a no-nonsense but entirely practical fashion. Podcasting, like blogs and wikis has already taken its place as a useful form of informal learning.

Games/simulations and learning

Stephen Johnson set the stage for this debate and it was so popular the sessions, like the wiki and blog sessions, had to be repeated on the final day. There was loads of debate about the sterility of old instructional design and the need for more motivational models.

Michael Allen gave us a good session but did the usual thing of blaming the technofetishes for all of our woes in e-learning. This is a mistake. The technology was and still is the innovative driver in e-learning, not trainers or pedagogic theorists.

His opening gambit was to ask the audience to come up with tips on designing e-learning. One guy simply said ‘Keep the lawyers away from content’. Well said.

Michael then came up with some bon mots:

• A constant in the e-learning market is over-reaction
• Vendors shouldn’t be our thought leaders
• Gartner’s hype cycle
• We buy into the hype because we’re looking for easy solutions

The audience came up with some suggestions which included the amazing ‘Reading is not learning’. He closed with a great example of e-learning on Sexual harassment for Apple. Great graphics and good structural design around scenario-led learning. Not an animation, piece of audio or video in sight – all reading. Way to go Michael!

The uninteresting stuff?

LMSs – mostly defensive presentations about war stories, how a purchased LMS was bought, then bought again. Everything that had to be said about this has been said. Standards – one client I knew wanted it retitled as ‘dull and duller’. This topic has run out of steam.

Finally some awards of my own.

Award for best session
Wikis and blogs in learning

Award for best session title
Keeping ‘em conscious

Award for dumbest session
How to dress for the classroom

Award for most irrelevant session
Faith, religion and training

Award for most surprisingly interesting session
Books and learning

Forgetting 2006

Next year we’re thinking about a real un-conference at the same time and venue. We’ll call it ‘Forgetting2006’, scrap all ‘sage from the stage’ stuff, ban PowerPoint completely, free beer and wine in all sessions, fines for vendors mentioning product names, and all discussion sessions will be held in the hotel pool, jaccuzi and bar. Now that would be a conference!

One last thing. Look out for Jay Cross’s book on Informal Learning this year. He really is an original thinker and this, for me, is the topic of the coming year.

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