Archive for April 2012
The Quantified Self and What it Means for Learning
In early April I presented (in Dutch) at the e-Learning Event about the quantified self and learning. I have now translated the slides into English as I think the topic is important enough. The presentation explains (in five parts) why the quantified self movement will have big consequences for how we will learn in the future. You can download a full resolution PDF file, watch a video (with slides) in Dutch or watch it on SlideShare:
Below an outline of the presentation and links to all the sources I used.
Innovation
A short explanation about what an innovation manager does and how an innovation funnel works.
Scenarios
The scenario process is explained and the four scenarios that were create at the Online Educa workshop are presented.
Sources
Quantified Self
The history of the quantifying yourself (and the scientist and artists experimenting with it) is shown. Consumer products show that it is now not only scientist and artist anymore.
Sources
- Quantified Self movement
- Vannevar Bush op Wikipedia
- As We May Think by Vannevar Bush
- Steve Mann
- Wearable Computing: A First Step Toward Personal Imaging, an article by Steve Mann
- Gordon Bell
- MyLifeBits
- Total Recall, a book
- Remember This?, an article in the New Yorker about Gordon Bell
- Facebook Timeline
- Feltron Report
- Een interview met Nicholas Felton
- Nog een interview met Felton
- Fitbit
- Wakoopa
- Counting every moment, an article in The Economist about the Quantified Self
- Laurie Frick, experiments in self tracking
Learning
An exploration about what the quantified self might mean for learning (in organisations).
Sources
- Artistotle by Danny Hillis
- Openness and the Future of Assessment by David Wiley
Risks
There are risks around measuring yourself.
Sources
- Delete, a book
- Why we must remember to delete – and forget – in the digital age, an article in the Guardian about Delete
- The Filter Bubble
- Invisible sieve, an artikel in The Economist about the Filter Bubble
- Big Brother Awards
- Bits of Freedom
Performance Consulting, Change- and Talent Management at ICBE
Today I attended the [Irish Center of Business Excellence] (ICBE) 2012 conference in Dublin, Ireland. I will blog about the following three talks:
Peter de Jager on Change
Peter de Jager talk was titled “Reducing Change to Seven Questions”.
According to de Jager everybody believes that “people resist change”. He then gave us many examples of how we all make big changes in our lives (getting married, bearing children, moving cities, changing jobs). Something like having kids is much bigger than implementing SAP. We embrace the former and we resist the latter. What is the fundamental difference between the one and the other? It is: choice. We don’t resist change, we resist being changed. We resist the most trivial thing if we don’t have control.
This means that the first question around change management will always be: “Why?”. The best thing to get people to accept change is to get them involved.
De Jager likes to reduce change to a set of seven questions:
- Why? Why is it necessary to do this? Don’t just tell me “because”. Why-questions seem to be taboo in organisations currently. We need to change this mentality and make sure that a real dialogue
- What’s in it for me? The problem with this is that it is not about you, because it is about the organisation. This is unfortunate because with any change it is top of mind of any employee. It requires some honesty from a corporation to address this question. If as a corporation you don’t know the answer, then at least communicate that.
- What might go wrong? We fool ourselves if we downplay the risk of change: there is always the change that something might go wrong.
- What will go wrong? There will be problems, guaranteed. Make sure you are prepared.
- What are your solutions?
- What will change?
- What will stay the same?
Peter de Jager has all the marks of an incessant self-promoter (I do realize I am on that journey too, but do hope I won’t get where he is). He presented without slides and clearly had told this exact story many times before. Unfortunately he still managed to lose me during his seven questions story. I am not even sure I captured them all correctly to be honest.
Nigel Harrison on How to be a True Business Partner through Performance Consulting
Nigel Harrison helps people adopt a consulting approach where they ask their clients what the problems is before they jump to solutions (what he calls solutioneering).
In traditional problem analysis we very often jump to solutions. The majority of the problems in our organizations is from previous solutions. Training is often one of these premature solutions. Harrison mentioned the conspiracy of convenience where everybody knows that it doesn’t deliver business value but it is in the interest of the learner, the trainer and the manager to act like the training is great.
His process for problem analysis works like this. Start by asking a few questions:
- Who is involved in this problem?
- What is happening now? This is about the current state.
- What do we want to see? This is about the desired state.
If you do this you can start asking: What is the value to the business if we close this gap? (Don’t forget to ask: What is the cost of doing nothing?)
He has a very nice image of his seven step process for performance consulting (find some more downloads here):
7 Steps of Performance Consulting
This is a simple process, but it does need skillful application to be effective:
- Building trust and support
- Really get into your business goals outside of L&D
- Drawing a systemic model with your client
- Supportive challenge to quantify the problem
- Creativity to develop integrated solutions
Common difficulties with the approach are:
- Dealing with the pressure for solutioneering
- The positioning of L&D
- Own power and credibility
He closed his session by showing how easy it then is to connect learning investment to business value. If you can’t define the business value then Nigel suggest to stop spending the money on the learning intervention.
Yvonne Earley on Talent Management
Yvonne Earley talked about talent management one of the five strategic objectives from her employer Abbott. They have truly integrated talent into their business planning.
The three fundamental things about the program are:
- Visibility of talent across the functions and across the divisions is really key.
- How do we assess our talent and how accurate is our assessment?
- How do we differentiate our talent? Our top talent should be in our strategic business critical positions so that they can have high impact experiences.
Everybody has a talent profile which serves as an internal resume/CV. The manager makes the assessment decisions around career trajectory, their potential (consists of aspiration, ability and commitment), performance, potential next moves, etc. (Leadership) Potential and Performance are rated in a 9 box two dimensional grid:
9 Box Grid: Potential and Performance
Their onboarding process is as follows:
- Getting prepared (pre-hire)
- Getting started (30 days)
- Getting productive (60 days)
- Broadening perspective (90 days)
- Maintaining alignment (the first year)
Earley had an amazing amount of other slides with frameworks and diagrams. Abbott seems to be a very process heavy organisation!
Learning from the Outside, How External Focus Can Help Learning and Development
This presentation delivered on April 19 for the Irish Centre for Business Excellence Network tries to address why things are not changing fast enough in the (corporate) learning world by pointing out that we often fail to look to the outside. We rely on benchmarking without realising that this will never get us ahead of the game. We try to implement best practices rather than focus on emergent practice. Changing this requires finding our edge and trying to see what you can learn from there. For corporations and organisations the edge can be found in things like the consumerisation of IT, open source, experimental academia and the startup world.
You can download the presentation as a PDF or watch in on SlideShare:
I’ve used many sources to create the presentation. Here are all the relevant links in context.
In the past I have thought a bit about seredendipity and have written a few blogposts about the topic.
Bert De Coutere describes how Learning and Development is stuck in his blog post Learning got stuck in itself…. Steve Wheeler writes about the differences between upstairs (where the Learning Technologies conference was held) and downstairs (where the learning vendors could tout their wares) in his post titled Upstairs downstairs.
If you are interested to learn more about Omphaloskepsis, check out this Wikipedia article.
The following three companies (among many others) offer benchmarking in the learning space: Corporate University Exchange, BrandonHall and Bersin (their benchmarking data for 2011 is available here).
Youngme Moon has written a book titled Different in which she explains why products in a category all become alike. Harold Jarche reviews the book in a blog post titled Different – Review. In that review he refers to Tim Kastelle who lifts stwo diagrams out of Moon’s book in Be Great at One Thing. I remade the diagrams using the excellent Inkscape.
The Wikipedia page about the Cynefin Framework isn’t bad. Dave Snowden’s Harvard Business Review article about his framework and how it can help with leadership is titled Leader’s Framework for Decision Making (and maybe I should credit Mary E. Boone for once).
Automattic is an amazing company. They create and host the wordpress.com platform (more information). The Automattic creed is available on Matt Mullenweg’s website. Matt gets interviewed here. This map shows where all the “Automatticians” are located. Check out this page if you want to know more about Automattic or are interested in working for them.
If you want to know more about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) you should start here and then quickly move on to what Stephen Downes writes in his piece What a MOOC Does. The MOOC example I decided to reference in the presentation is Digital Storytelling also known as DS106.
The term Edupunk was coined in Jim Groom’s post The Glass Bees and quickly got its own Wikipedia article. Stephen Downes tied together a few good posts about the topic here and this article on BlogHer could also be a good start.
The big open online courses that are now fashionable and are starting to get a commercial face (Coursera and Udacity) owe their debts to MOOCs and the Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU).
If you want to be kept up to date about learning technology “on the edge” then your best bet is likely to pay close attention to Audrey Watters’ blog Hack Education (not mentioned in my presentation).
Mozilla‘s mission page is here and it is worthwile reading their whole manifesto. Their Open Badges program is getting a lot of deserved attention and could always use more participants. You can read about all their learning plans on their Learning Wiki, this is also the place to go to if you want to get involved.
If you are interested in becoming more entrepreneurial and innovative, regardless of whether you have your own business or are working in a company/organisation, you can’t do better than read The Lean Startup.
5 Questions from Traintool: Teaching Soft Skills Online
Recently I was asked a few questions by Traintool about using training softs skills online. Below the questions and answers (the original is here, the session was in Dutch which is available here):
1. To what extent to you believe soft skills can be trained online?
“Believe” is probably the right verb for this question. Learning technology is still too often driven by opinions. Having said so, I definitely believe in it. First: a lot of soft skills have become online skills: how you behave in an online community, how you share knowledge through microblogging, or how you can be a good team member in an international virtual team. Additionally, it’s perfectly possible to practice all sorts of soft skills online. I see a natural increase of the “fidelity” of the practice process: from practicing in simple webchats, to practice in teleconferences, to practice with webcams or maybe even telepresence spaces. Finally, I think good design enables training of all sorts of skills.
2. What developments in the field of online training of soft skills do you find most promising? Can you name an example?
The biggest “opportunity space” is gaming. Recently I have been investigating two examples of games that try to train soft skills online:
- X-Team is a 3D game in which you have to visit as many pagodes as possible, before getting to the finish line in time. These pagodes are at islands that can only be reached through bridges. Each bridge can only be crossed a limited number of times (you are with 12, but only 6 people can cross the bridge, wat do you do?). Everything is measured, making it easy to guide a teambuilding process through facilitation and adjusting the game’s parameters.
- Code 4 from Hubbub and Demovides is a game that is played in runs of three weeks. This video explains the game (Dutch):
3. What do you think is the biggest challenge in training soft skills online?
Practice is key in developing skills, so that’s the biggest challenge: How do you get people to do what they find really difficult? How do you get them beyond their fear of trying new behavior? Well developed games might just be the solution to this.
4. In the evolution of learning, are there things you hope/desire and/or you’re afraid of? Alan Kay has a famous definition of technology: “Technology is everything that didn’t exist when you were born”. His pal Danny Hillis has an even better definition: “Technology is everything that doesn’t work yet”. We no longer call an elevator, technology. So I’m looking forward to seeing things we still call technology, actually work. For a nice example of how that could look like for smartphones with apps, read this (under “Why Mobile Apps Must Die”).
Being afraid is not something that fits in with how I look at life. I think we, as people, will always figure out our relationship with technology. But if I have to name something, I worry about the integrity of the Internet with the web as a platform for innovation on top of it. The five ”stacks” (as Bruce Sterling calls them): Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook are all working hard to build closed ecosystems. We are going to suffer from this in the coming years and it will probably really have to hurt before these silos will be opened up.
5. What weblogs, people or organisations inspire you?
The person I learn a lot from is Stephen Downes. He writes a daily newsletter about this things he, as a philosopher, technologist and education theorist, finds interesting. His newsletter is published under a Creative Commons license and you can freely subscribe. Additionally, I keep a close eye on George Siemens and the Internet Time Alliance and I try to make time to read Audrey Watters: a learning technology journalist with a punk attitude. I keep on top of internet technology in general by listening to Guardian Tech Weekly and the shows of Leo Laporte (especially This Week in Tech). Thinkers such as Clay Shirky, Yochai Benkler, Lawrence Lessig and Douglas Rushkoff guide me.
One of my personal heroes is Martin Dougiamas, inventor of Moodle. It’s his natural leadership and personal character that have made Moodle as succesful as it is today, making even a giant such as Blackboard take notice.
Other organisations that inspire me are those that democratize education and technology in a non-commercial way. Think of Mozilla architects of the open internet (they also have a learning outfit and work hard at an Open Badges infrastructure), or the Peer 2 Peer University, Tactical Technology Collective and Ushahidi. It is no coincidence that all these projects are open-source. I believe in the value of open-source a lot, from a practical and a moral standpoint.
Dutch Presentation about the Quantified Self (Leren is Meten Weten)
I presented the following keynote (in Dutch) at the the e-Learning Event 2012 (an English version of this message is available here):
Deze presentatie legt in vijf delen uit waarom de trend om jezelf te meten (quantified self) grote gevolgen gaat hebben voor hoe wij in de toekomst gaan leren (je kunt de presentatie ook als PDF downloaden en dan werken de overlay quotes bij de foto’s wel of je kunt een opname van de hele keynote bekijken):
Innovatie
Een korte uitleg over wat een innovatie manager doet en over de innovatie funnel.
Scenario’s
Het scenario proces wordt uitgelegd en de vier scenarios die uit een workshop op de Online Educa zijn gekomen worden toegelicht.
Bronnen
Quantified Self
De geschiedenis van de trend om jezelf te meten wordt uit de doeken gedaan. Met consumentenvoorbeelden is te zien dat het niet meer alleen voor wetenschappers en artiesten is weggelegd.
Bronnen
- Quantified Self movement
- Vannevar Bush op Wikipedia
- As We May Think door Vannevar Bush
- Steve Mann
- Wearable Computing: A First Step Toward Personal Imaging, een artikel van Steve Mann
- Gordon Bell
- MyLifeBits
- Total Recall, een boek
- Remember This?, een artikel in de New Yorker over Gordon Bell
- Facebook Timeline
- Feltron Report
- Een interview met Nicholas Felton
- Nog een interview met Felton
- Fitbit
- Wakoopa
- Counting every moment, een artikel in The Economist over the Quantified Self
- Laurie Frick, experiments in self tracking
Leren
Een verkenning van wat de Quantified Self trend kan betekenen voor leren (in organisaties).
Bronnen
- Artistotle door Danny Hillis
- Openness and the Future of Assessment door David Wiley
Risico’s
Er kleven ook risico’s aan jezelf meten.
Bronnen
- Delete, een boek
- Why we must remember to delete – and forget – in the digital age, een artikel in de Guardian over Delete
- The Filter Bubble
- Invisible sieve, een artikel in The Economist over the Filter Bubble
- Big Brother Awards
- Bits of Freedom
Presentatie
De volledige presentatie kan hier als PDF gedownload worden.
Storytelling for Behavioural Change at the e-Learning Event
Maggie Shelton works for Ikea and talked about storytelling. She started her talk by showing some of the stories that Ikea allowed their staff to tell about their personal lives and how they relate to the culture at Ikea. See this one for an example (not the example Maggie used, the stories aren’t public):
Ikea’s Human Resources department actively uses these videos to share how their culture lives and it can be really be a tool that engages people with the company. Storytelling is all about gaining trust. Authenticity is important. This means there is a big difference between a message coming from high above or a message coming from “the workfloor”. I personally find these type of stories (consciously not using a big Ikea logo in the back) of which they have more than a thousand(!) incredibly valuable. According to Shelton they are also timeless.
She then shared the example of the “home furnishing introduction”. This was an assignment where she, as a learning person, had to help the home furnishing manager with some of her goals around how people should be engaged with home furnishing. She created a story about a guy who is a bit in mess and who starts reflecting on himself through his own home. She played us the first episode. The film was made with as little spoken language as possible as it had to be translated into 28 languages. The video is then used in a two-hour lightly facilitated workshop.
If you want to have maximum impact with your story (on learning), then it is very important to have discussions after watching the film, usually by asking questions about the video.
One more thing I learned from this session is that there is a circular Ikea store built in 1965 Stockholm inspired by New York’s Guggenheim, interesting!
Ikea Store inspired by Guggenheim
Erik Duval on Learning Analytics at the e-Learning Event
Erik Duval is a professor at the Catholic University in Leuven. His team works on Human Computer Interaction. In the last few years, he has done a lot of work around Learning Analytics, which he defines as being about collecting traces that learners leave behind and using those traces to improve learning.
His students at the university do everything (and he means everything) using blogs and Twitter. He stopped giving lectures and instead works with students in a single place a few times a week. This makes it very hard for him to follow what is going on. The number of posts that are generated in his courses are too many for him to read them all. If you are facilitating a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) this gets worse. This is why we do learning analytics. This has a lot of attention now with a conference and a Society for Learning Analytics Research
Nike+ Fuelband
Next he mentions the quantified self movement: self-knowledge to self-tracking. If a tool gives you a good mirror about your behaviour, then this might make it easier to actually change your behaviour. He showed many examples from the consumer market (i.e. Nike+ Fuelband or the Fitbit. He is trying to see if you could develop similar applications for learning. Imagine setting a goal for how many words you want to learn every day and a device that shows you how many you’ve learned for the day. He wants to create awareness in the student, so that they can “drive” themselves better. This is different from the current efforts in learning analytics where they are mostly used to give more information to the institution (Duval doesn’t like that). He showed us an example of the dashboard that he uses to see the student’s activity on the blogs and on Twitter. The students have access to this information too and can see that data for their peers: openness and full transparency. This measuring leads to externalities that aren’t necessarily good (think students writing tweetbots to get good score). Duval depends on the self-regulating abilities of the group of students.
At the beginning of each course he tells his student that everything will be open in the course. He might have a debate about this, but he never gives in. He doesn’t think you can become an engineer without having the ability to engage openly with the society. If a student has very conscionable objections around privatey, then he sometimes allows them to publish under an alias.
If you collect a lot of data about people, then you can make technology enhanced learning more of an exact (i.e. hard) science. He wrote a paper titled: Dataset-driven Research for Improving Recommender Systems for Learning.
This whole field has a couple of issues:
- What can we measure? Time, time spent artefact produced, socal interactions, location. Many other things might be important.
- Privacy might become an issue: we will know so many things about everybody. One solution might be Attention Trust which defines four consumer rights for your (attention) data: property, mobility, economy and transparency. Our idea about privacy is changing, he referred to Public Parts by Jeff Jarvis.
- When does support become enslaving (see this blogpost)
His solution for the problems (once again): openness.
Duval’s talk had a lot of similarities with the talk I will be delivering tomorrow. Luckily we both come from slightly different angles and don’t share all our examples. If you attended his talk and didn’t enjoy his, then you can skip mine! If you loved it, come and get more tomorrow morning.
