Learning, thinking, dialogue.
Thursday, May 03, 2012
Labels: cool new ideas, e-learning, online learning
Thursday, April 05, 2012
One of the key principles of Lean is that communications should be structured. I wasn't really sure what this meant, exactly. So I asked my own person consultant in all things business process related (my daughter Nicole) what this was about.
What she said was pretty simple, actually. That a communications plan should be in place that specifies how and what communication is going to occur. At first I thought that there simply must be more to this than that -- but then I remembered something that happened to me a while back.
And my teammate hopped to and installed the software.
And then the nightmare began -- not for me, but for the people who were responsible for actually supporting users in the lab, people that I had completely neglected to either ask or inform of my grand plans. It was with great embarrassment that I heard about the extra work and headaches I had caused for my team. And then I asked my teammate to uninstall it and put things back the way they were.
After that experience, I find myself not only stopping and thinking, "Who needs to know this?" but also thinking, "And who ELSE needs to know? And who ELSE?" A plan for structured communications helps to prevent this sort of problem.
Recently, when I was helping the team rolling out a new student information system by developing user training, I was able to see that my plan for every-other-day status updates did inform my teammates, stakeholders, and clients. They all knew what was going on. But more importantly, their sense of anxiety was lessened as well. They knew what was going on, and they knew they were going to hear again from me. Their energy didn't have to go into being worried. It could go into getting the project finished.
Labels: cool new ideas, Lean
Tuesday, April 03, 2012
I stumbled across a cool new tool today -- ThingLink. This tool allows you to upload a photo or graphic, insert hot spots, and link them to video, photos, or URLs. Here's a quick one I just did -- I had a lot more trouble using iMovie than I did ThingLink!
You can see my first attempt here.
You can see my first attempt here.
Monday, April 02, 2012
As I've developed my instructional design model for deaf adult learners, I've turned to brain science to understand how I should best present content. My study has centered on Cognitive Load Theory, and what implications that has for deaf folks. Of course, it isn't as simple as checking out studies on cognitive load and deaf learners. Studies that answer my questions don't seem to exist. But I have been able to find studies that I think apply. Here's a summary of my findings.
1. Pretraining – understanding the names of things and how components work first – reduces cognitive load.
2. Mental Models have two parts: First A representation of how parts work, and second, causal, how the parts affect one another.
3. Novice learners need content signals. This means they need to be signaled when there is something they need to learn appearing on the screen.
4. Novice learners need content weeded. This means there should be no extraneous information presented to reduce cognitive load.
5. Novice learners need video to be segmented. They need the time between videos to move content from working memory to long-term memory.
6. Text on screen and voiced text at the same time increase cognitive load. Obviously deaf people don't hear text. But information conveyed in sign language, the deaf person's native language, is shown by some studies to be processed similarly to voiced text.
7. Voiced text and graphics are better that text on screen and graphics. So perhaps signed language and graphics are better than text and graphics.
8. Text and graphics on screen increase learning if:
Words and pictures are shown at the same time. Illustrations are weeded. Text and pictures are physically close to one another. An integrated instructional format is used. This means that the explanation of parts of a illustration are actually in the illustration, not separated above or below the graphic.
Words and pictures are shown at the same time. Illustrations are weeded. Text and pictures are physically close to one another. An integrated instructional format is used. This means that the explanation of parts of a illustration are actually in the illustration, not separated above or below the graphic.
9. If students verbalize about their learning, they are better able to solve novel, ill-defined problems.
10. Retention/transfer is greater when students build their own personal, external graphical representations. This is known as “Activation.”
Sources:
Chandler, Paul and John Sweller. Cognitive Load Theory and the Format of Instruction, Cognition and Instruction: 8(4) 1991, 293-332.
De Westelinck, Katrien and Martin Valcke. The Impact of External Graphical Representations in Different Knowledge Domains: Is There a Domain Effect?
Hickok, Gregory, Ursula Bellugi, and Edward S. Klima. Sign Language in the Brain, Scientific American, June 2001.
Ibrahim, Mohamed and Pavlo D. Antonenko. Effects of Segmenting, Signaling, and Weeding on Learning from an Educational Video.
James, S. A. (2001, June 7). Magazine articles in APA format. Newsweek, 20, 48-52.
Mayer, Richard E. and Roxana Moreno. Nine Ways to Reduce Cognitive Load in Multimedia Learning. Educational Psychologist, 38(1), 43-52.
Thomas, Nigel J. T. Dual coding and Common Coding Theories of Memory, Mental Imagery, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Winter 2011 Edition.
Friday, March 30, 2012
I recently read an excellent article in the Harvard Business Review on Lean and how it might apply to knowledge work. The article, from the October 2011 edition, is titled, Applying "Lean" Principles to Knowledge Work, by Bradley R Staats and David M. Upton. I encourage you to check it out, and take a look at HBR while you are at it.
This post will be about the second of six things the authors suggest. "Strive to make tacit knowledge explicit," they say. I think most people think that the type of work that knowledge workers deal it is fundamentally tacit. That is, it's in one guy's head, and it's not going to be able to be seen by others. I don't agree with this view. It's not going to be easy, but we need to make tacit knowledge visible.
One place to start, when we are talking about the development of instruction, is to separate the repeatable parts of a process and codify them. Here's an example. Let's imagine that we are developing a course on how to conduct a meeting for an audience of first-time team leads. There are practically an infinite number of ways we could go on this. And a lot of these would be valid approaches. And casting about, trying to decide which of these approaches is the best, well, that takes a lot of time. And when whoever the person is that reviews it sees the course, they may or may not agree with the approach. And then there will be at least one, if not several, long discussions about that approach. And all those conversations mean time, and frustration too.
So instead of that, my team and I determined what the default approach was going to be on any and all courses. We agreed that whenever possible, content needed to mirror the work environment that our students would return to. That all information should be as much like real life as possible. And content should be presented in job order.
We also reviewed a number of courses, and realized that all of the tasks that these courses taught students to do had a beginning, a middle, and an end. Every job-based task fell into this pattern. So when we were discussing the outline of a course, we would start by dividing the white board into three sections: The first for all preliminary tasks, the middle section for the main tasks, and then the last section for any tasks that would take place after the main tasks. Sometimes we would have a fourth section for troubleshooting and problem solving. This dramatically sped up our planning, and it also made it possible for us to collaborate on determining what the tasks were in those categories.
Another thing we did was to agree on the types of content and the requirements for those types of content, were included in instruction. We loosely followed the work of Ruth Clarke and Robert Mayer on content typing. We found over time that we improved our original model. But having a place to start from was a huge leg up. We all understood what type of content to choose if we wanted our student to determine if something was a member of a group or not. And we all understood what that content type (a concept in this example) required. Codifying this gave us consistent results, and made it much easier to use multiple writers on a project.
This post will be about the second of six things the authors suggest. "Strive to make tacit knowledge explicit," they say. I think most people think that the type of work that knowledge workers deal it is fundamentally tacit. That is, it's in one guy's head, and it's not going to be able to be seen by others. I don't agree with this view. It's not going to be easy, but we need to make tacit knowledge visible.
One place to start, when we are talking about the development of instruction, is to separate the repeatable parts of a process and codify them. Here's an example. Let's imagine that we are developing a course on how to conduct a meeting for an audience of first-time team leads. There are practically an infinite number of ways we could go on this. And a lot of these would be valid approaches. And casting about, trying to decide which of these approaches is the best, well, that takes a lot of time. And when whoever the person is that reviews it sees the course, they may or may not agree with the approach. And then there will be at least one, if not several, long discussions about that approach. And all those conversations mean time, and frustration too.
So instead of that, my team and I determined what the default approach was going to be on any and all courses. We agreed that whenever possible, content needed to mirror the work environment that our students would return to. That all information should be as much like real life as possible. And content should be presented in job order.
We also reviewed a number of courses, and realized that all of the tasks that these courses taught students to do had a beginning, a middle, and an end. Every job-based task fell into this pattern. So when we were discussing the outline of a course, we would start by dividing the white board into three sections: The first for all preliminary tasks, the middle section for the main tasks, and then the last section for any tasks that would take place after the main tasks. Sometimes we would have a fourth section for troubleshooting and problem solving. This dramatically sped up our planning, and it also made it possible for us to collaborate on determining what the tasks were in those categories.
Another thing we did was to agree on the types of content and the requirements for those types of content, were included in instruction. We loosely followed the work of Ruth Clarke and Robert Mayer on content typing. We found over time that we improved our original model. But having a place to start from was a huge leg up. We all understood what type of content to choose if we wanted our student to determine if something was a member of a group or not. And we all understood what that content type (a concept in this example) required. Codifying this gave us consistent results, and made it much easier to use multiple writers on a project.
Labels: cool new ideas, e-learning, Lean
Thursday, March 29, 2012
I'd heard about "lean principles" in the context of a manufacturing environment, and one thing I can tell you is that developing instruction is not very much like manufacturing. So I didn't really think of how I could apply lean principles to the work of my department when I was considering how we might improve our productivity. But my instructional designer, Allison, pointed out an interesting article in the Harvard Business Review from October 2011 titled, Applying "Lean" Principles to Knowledge Work, by Bradley R Staats and David M. Upton.
I'm a huge, huge fan of the HBR. I've subscribed for years, and month in and month out there is something interesting in it that has helped me be a better manager, or has validated something I was doing instinctively. And this article couldn't have come at a better time.
Here's a definition of "lean" from Wikipedia:
Indeed, this is true. Frequently, when I've developed business skills or design content, both of which rely on principal based content, I hear from subject matter experts that the content "can't be taught." My reply is that difficult to do is not the same as impossible. And because I have figured out the parts that repeat, that don't involve judgement or expertise, I can use those as a framework for the other parts of the content.
The article suggests six things to do to incorporate "lean" into knowledge work. In this post, I'll discuss the first: Rooting out waste.
I'm a huge, huge fan of the HBR. I've subscribed for years, and month in and month out there is something interesting in it that has helped me be a better manager, or has validated something I was doing instinctively. And this article couldn't have come at a better time.
Here's a definition of "lean" from Wikipedia:
Lean manufacturing, lean enterprise, or lean production, often simply, "Lean," is a production practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination. Working from the perspective of the customer who consumes a product or service, "value" is defined as any action or process that a customer would be willing to pay for.Staats and Upton start by acknowledging how difficult it might be to apply lean principles to knowledge work. They state, "Most in the business world believe that knowledge work doesn't lend itself to lean principals because, unlike car assembly, it is not repetitive and can't be unambiguously defined. ...The work involves expertise and judgement that depends heavily on tacit knowledge - knowledge locked inside the worker's head."
Indeed, this is true. Frequently, when I've developed business skills or design content, both of which rely on principal based content, I hear from subject matter experts that the content "can't be taught." My reply is that difficult to do is not the same as impossible. And because I have figured out the parts that repeat, that don't involve judgement or expertise, I can use those as a framework for the other parts of the content.
The article suggests six things to do to incorporate "lean" into knowledge work. In this post, I'll discuss the first: Rooting out waste.
The first item dealt with rooting out waste. There are seven sources of waste:
a. Overproduction
b. Unnecessary transportation
c. Unnecessary inventory
d. Unnecessary worker motion
e. Defects
f. Over-processing
g. Waiting
When I read "overproduction" I think about content where everything but the kitchen sink has been included. I frequently see what amounts to a "brain dump" coming from subject matter experts. This is not good instruction, and it's not Lean either. Instead, if the project team has a well-crafted design document, where every item included contributes to the mission of the course (instead of just being in there because the SME happens to know it), the instruction is more targeted and no overproduction is taking place.
"Unnecessary transportation" and "Unnecessary inventory" also seem like they would have much to do with developing training materials. But instead of thinking of transportation as shipping, instead think of it as how content is moved from one part of the process to the next. How does the editor and QA know it's time to get to work on a lesson? Is content in a centralized location? Or being moved about in emails?
"Inventory" could refer to out of date courses that no one has taken the time to delete from lists of offerings, so students have to scroll past them. It could refer to printing courses that could be delivered on screen or online.
The point is, you will need to read the list with a open mind, thinking less literally, perhaps, and find the places where you can root out waste in your own process. And this is an ongoing process, not something that is done once and for all.
2.
Labels: cool new ideas, e-learning, Lean, Learning
Monday, March 19, 2012
I've been asked to review e-learning and give feedback, and to be honest, I don't see much out there that is very good. The academic realm is the worst, by far. Many professors thing that e-learning = a video of them talking. Oh dear.
But even the professionally made materials can be pretty uninspiring. And then I found Lynda.com. Wow. Here are five things I love about Lynda.com:
1. The clips are the right size. A long one might be nine or ten minutes. They cover a topic in a single clip, and they don't have many clips that seem to be "orientation" or as someone I used to work with called it, "throat clearing." I didn't buy the course files with my subscription, so the way I work with the material is to play the file, and stop at each step. Then I work on my own project, doing whatever was just taught. Then back to the clip. If the clips were longer, it would be much clunkier (is that a word?) to do this.
2. The content is task oriented. Because they aren't just running through menus (and yes, some people actually still train this way), I can switch back and forth from a real project to the clip. Because they are doing things I want to do. There will be a higher rate of retention for me too, because I am learning it like I will use it in the future. And I have already used the clips for "just in time" reminders of how to do something.
3. The navigation and interface is intuitive. I didn't have to have a lesson on how to use the interface. If you find yourself adding this to your project, know in your heart that there is a big fundamental problem with your interface. This isn't 1988.
4. The content is captioned. You didn't think I was going to ignore that, did you? I'm shocked at how much in the world is NOT accessible. Again, this isn't 1988. Because the content was captioned, I could buy subscriptions for my 14 team mates. Some of whom are deaf.
5. The tone of the instructors is great. They have a friendly, easy to follow approach that I liked. The instructors also come across like they actually use the software they are teaching. They seem like they are a trusted friend, someone who knows what they are doing, and they are giving you the inside scoop on the software.
One thing I do wish Lynda.com would change is their purchase options. I wanted to buy 14 licenses for my team -- one each. This should be easy, right? Just give them a list of email addresses, type in my credit card info and bang, you are done. Right? No. The level of service Lynda.com wants me to purchase, since I was purchasing for a group, was more than I wanted to buy. Instead I was forced to give the team "gift cards" for the subscription. Please, Lynda, make it easier before I have to renew all those subscriptions!
Check out Lynda.com. I think you will like it as much as I do!
But even the professionally made materials can be pretty uninspiring. And then I found Lynda.com. Wow. Here are five things I love about Lynda.com:
1. The clips are the right size. A long one might be nine or ten minutes. They cover a topic in a single clip, and they don't have many clips that seem to be "orientation" or as someone I used to work with called it, "throat clearing." I didn't buy the course files with my subscription, so the way I work with the material is to play the file, and stop at each step. Then I work on my own project, doing whatever was just taught. Then back to the clip. If the clips were longer, it would be much clunkier (is that a word?) to do this.
2. The content is task oriented. Because they aren't just running through menus (and yes, some people actually still train this way), I can switch back and forth from a real project to the clip. Because they are doing things I want to do. There will be a higher rate of retention for me too, because I am learning it like I will use it in the future. And I have already used the clips for "just in time" reminders of how to do something.
3. The navigation and interface is intuitive. I didn't have to have a lesson on how to use the interface. If you find yourself adding this to your project, know in your heart that there is a big fundamental problem with your interface. This isn't 1988.
4. The content is captioned. You didn't think I was going to ignore that, did you? I'm shocked at how much in the world is NOT accessible. Again, this isn't 1988. Because the content was captioned, I could buy subscriptions for my 14 team mates. Some of whom are deaf.
5. The tone of the instructors is great. They have a friendly, easy to follow approach that I liked. The instructors also come across like they actually use the software they are teaching. They seem like they are a trusted friend, someone who knows what they are doing, and they are giving you the inside scoop on the software.
One thing I do wish Lynda.com would change is their purchase options. I wanted to buy 14 licenses for my team -- one each. This should be easy, right? Just give them a list of email addresses, type in my credit card info and bang, you are done. Right? No. The level of service Lynda.com wants me to purchase, since I was purchasing for a group, was more than I wanted to buy. Instead I was forced to give the team "gift cards" for the subscription. Please, Lynda, make it easier before I have to renew all those subscriptions!
Check out Lynda.com. I think you will like it as much as I do!
Labels: cool new ideas, e-learning
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