Learn. Show. Repeat.

Category: Reflections

  • Getting Started with Curating Content

    Art Gallery

    Curation. Whenever I hear the term I always think of a person working in an art gallery carefully selecting pieces of work for an upcoming exhibition. But I’m also seeing it as a skill needed for modern L&D folks…

    “We need curators and community managers, rather than course designers” Charles Jennings

    …and certainly it’s an area (along with community management) that I want to explore more and build my own capability in. But how can I do this?

    What is curation?

    The starting point in wanting to learn more about how to do something is to know what it means. So here’s a couple definitions that I found online:

    “Curation isn’t just about collecting or filtering…it’s about adding value through context and analysis” David Kelly

    “A Content Curator is someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online” Rohit Bhargava

    I thought that I was curating already by selecting some of the articles/videos/blog posts that I come across and sharing them via social media e.g. Twitter, LinkedIn but the comments above suggest that it’s more than this. Ok, I’ll give this a go by adding some curated resources at the end of my blog posts that ties in with the topic of the post.

    I feel comfortable in attempting to curate content within the eLearning space as it’s an area that I have experience in and being active in SoMe means that I’m exposed to lots of information in the field plus people who I interact with online.

    But if curation is a skill needed by L&D professionals, a big question for me is:

    How do I curate content outside of my area of expertise?

    As an example, if right now I was working in an L&D department within an organisation, I might need to curate some resources for managers to develop their capability for managing people. How can I do this effectively when 1) I haven’t managed staff myself for a long time and 2) I’m not actively across what’s available out there. How can I tell the ‘wheat from the chaff’ in terms of curating resources for them when (from my point of view) I’m not in a position of credibility?

    One of my pet peeves is that in a number of posts/articles etc. that I read about the ‘future of L&D’ is that they often just focus on what L&D should be doing but provide little to no guidance on the how. It’s easy to say “L&D need to be content curators” but it seems like there’s more to it than pulling a few resources together.

    Generally speaking, for the L&D people I come into contact with, the field is very much entrenched in the course mindset which are one-off learning events that are expected to bring about change. I see content curation as being more ongoing but will require a huge mindset shift from developing courses.

    I’m keen to learn more about the practical, the doing, the how of curation as well as how do we get there. Do you curate? If so, how do you do it? Please let me know your thoughts/ideas/advice in the comments below and if you have any examples of curated content, let me know too.

    I did come across this example of curated content about curation by David Kelly which I thought was a good one because there’s lots of articles on the subject:

    Curation: Beyond the Buzzword

  • Happy Same Year!?

    Welcome to 2016!

    As a new year is upon us, it’s that time again where folks who blog about learning and development share their predictions for the coming year. It’s always fun to see where people think the field is going and it would be interesting to look back on the year in December to see how close their predictions were.

    So, in the spirit of a new year I thought I’d throw out a few ideas of my own about L&D for the year ahead (specifically for those working in L&D). My overall prediction is that what’s easy to do will be favoured over what’s necessary and while there may be good intentions across the L&D field to change, most of these won’t come to fruition.

    Here’s some specific thoughts:

    Professional Development
    Attending conferences will be the main source of PD for learning folks, after all it’s a day or two out of the office, the food is usually good and there’s the possibility of gathering some forward-thinking ideas from the presenters. Then it’s back to work all juiced up with the intention of ‘doing things differently’ but the ideas will either be forgotten completely within a week or will be blocked by someone at a more senior level and subsequently abandoned without a fight.

    Formal courses will also be relied on for the ongoing development of learning and development folks which will be the reason why courses will be offered as the default option to upskill employees. After all, if L&D people only take courses they’re not exposing themselves to different ways of learning so how can they offer other methods to others?

    Workplace Learning
    Online courses will continue to be used as stand-alone, one-off learning experiences or a way to convert classroom sessions and will involve shovelling copious amounts of content at those who are forced to take them. Considered design, user experience, contextualisation and personalisation will take a backseat to content dumps. Micro, on-demand and social learning will not feature on the L&D radar or be integrated with more formal approaches. Many learning folks will be left scratching their heads as to why courses don’t deliver value or change behaviour and the business will again dismiss L&D as a waste of time.

    Learning Research
    There’s a large existing body of learning research and evidence about how people process information and learn. This year, the research will again be ignored completely in learning design (mainly due to a lack of awareness that it even exists) although a preference for incorporating learning styles and use of the MBTI instrument will remain as popular as ever.

    Social Media
    Using tools like blogs, LinkedIn, Twitter, Yammer or Pinterest will be largely ignored by learning professionals (for personal and workplace learning) apart from a short spike in usage after attending a learning conference. This will fade in the days after the event as pre-conference ways of working and learning take over. The perception of SoMe as ‘goofing off’ will remain strong in organisations and at the same time the opportunity for free, on-demand learning will be lost as connection to people and access to knowledge is blocked by corporate firewalls.

    Same old ways

    While this post is somewhat tongue-in-cheek and generalises everyone, it does reflect what I see among learning and development professionals that I come into contact with. I do know that there are L&D folks who are chipping away at change but they are definitely in the minority. I’m really hoping that the opposite of what I’ve written here happens in 2016 so let’s check back at the end of the year and see…

  • Looking Back at 2015

    Well another year has just about come and gone and at this time of year like many folks who write blogs I like to look back and reflect on the posts I’ve written. Blog writing is a personal thing and everyone has their own style and approach which makes the diversity between writers and topics both interesting and thought-provoking. If I had to sum up where I’m at with my blogging and the style of posts I write in one word, it would be Practicality.

    I read a lot of posts and tweets that are critical of eLearning modules (some for good reasons) and I often tell people that an eLearning module is a learning solution it’s not always the learning solution. But it does have a purpose, so instead of constantly bagging it out, my approach is: Why don’t we do something about improving the standard of eLearning?

    So that’s why I like to share posts that explain how to do something and allow the reader to take something away and maybe use in their own course development. Sure, at the moment there’s a focus on using the tool which is important but I intend to expand this next year because eLearning is much more than knowing how to use an authoring tool.

    I’m learning stuff all the time so why not share the knowledge and put it back into the community so here’s my posts from the year that was, grouped by topic area. Click on a title to view the post.

    Storyline 2

    These posts are about things I’ve learned about or discovered in Storyline 2:

    More than One Way with Storyline 2 – How I updated a slider-based interaction to a button and number variable interaction.

    Template Facelift – How I redesigned my ‘Meet the Team’ interaction.

    Spinning Around with Storyline 2 – How I created a carousel-style interaction using a slider and layers.

    3 Things I’ve Just Discovered in Storyline 2 – I’d just started a new job and my colleagues made me aware of these three handy features.

    E-Learning Heroes Challenges

    These posts take a behind-the-scenes look at how I created some of my challenge demos. I used to call them ‘Showing My Work #x’ but I didn’t think it was helpful to the reader plus it sounded a bit wanky so I started to give them a catchy name:

    Pushing My Buttons – ELH Challenge #89: Creative Button Styles.

    100 Not Out – Celebrating 100 ELH Challenges.

    Bingo Time! – ELH Challenge #98: E-Learning Bingo Games.

    Making Videos Interactive – ELH Challenge #94: Interactive Video.

    Showing My Work #11 – ELH Challenge #18: Using Characters in E-Learning.

    Showing My Work #10 – ELH Challenge #52: Using Interactive Sliders in E-Learning.

    Showing My Work #9 – ELH Challenge #71: Teaching Math Concepts with E-Learning.

    Theoretical

    These posts delve into the area of information processing and cognitive load which are important areas to know about when creating eLearning:

    Designing Effective Multimedia Lessons for Learning – a university essay I wrote about the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning and research-based principles that will improve eLearning design.

    The Human Memory System – a university essay I wrote about human cognitive architecture.

    Reflective

    Sometimes I just reflected and put down my thoughts and ideas. I’d like to do more of this next year:

    Half-baked Ideas – a few random thoughts that may become posts of their own in the future.

    Looking Behind the Façade – my thoughts on showing your work and working out loud.

    Evolution – about how my career has changed for the better.

    Practice and Sharing: The Keys to Success – an older post with my two takeaways from LearnX.

    Flipped Networking – about how it’s becoming more common meet people online via social media before in person at a conference.

     

    Thanks to everyone who has read or commented or liked or shared something from this site, I really appreciate it. I’d like to wish you all the best for the festive season and for the new year ahead.

    Who knows what 2016 will hold…

    Ideas for 2016

  • Half-baked Ideas

    Death_to_stock_Dinner_damo_9

    This week is Work Out Loud or #WOLweek and the purpose is to be more open and share what you’re working on. So, in the spirit of the week I went to my notebook where I write down ideas and thoughts about what I see and read from the world around me. They’re raw, not fully formed and some not fully thought through (sometimes I was just venting) but they are things that at some stage I thought were important enough to write down. The idea is that they might become posts of their own eventually.

    Here they are in no particular order:

    • Too much time and effort is spent hypothesising about the future. No-one knows what’s its going to be like but geez, there’s a lot of people making money from painting a picture of the ‘ideal’ learning and development future.

     

    • There’s also way too much pontificating about what learning and development folks should be doing and not enough practical advice from the more experienced that will actually help others to get to this ‘ideal’ future. Models are fine but give me something that will help me right now. Give me something that I can use to start bringing about change.

     

    • Is working out loud really for everyone or is it just for people who work in offices and have access to a computer? When I look around me I see the person who collects my rubbish and the checkout person at the supermarket and the person working in a coal mine. Is WOL for them?

     

    • I know that debate is healthy but dividing a profession isn’t. I wonder if other professions have the same problem.

     

    • People need to take control of their own learning and the majority don’t. Too many rely on courses or someone doing it for them. How about figuring something out for yourself.

     

    • I love using social media tools to connect and learn from others but the reality is the majority of people working in the learning field aren’t connected, don’t use them and therefore won’t introduce them into their workplaces. This doesn’t mean we should give up on using them and spreading the word but the reality is that for many organisations this is a long, long way off.

     

    • I’m thinking about adding a ‘Downloads’ page for my blog site and creating some interactions the people can look at but also use in their own projects or learn more about how to use Storyline 2. I’ll need to get a few together first.

     

    • Poor quality eLearning is not due to authoring tools themselves but due to the users of them not constantly wanting to improve, try new ideas and experiment. However, the fact that anyone can get their hands on one does mean that people think they can use them.

     

    Well, that’s it. This is the first time I’ve written a post in one sitting and haven’t put it aside to work on later and it’s uncomfortable but it’s done now 🙂

  • Looking Behind the Facade

    Since I was young I’ve always enjoyed stopping whenever I come across a construction site. I’m interested in how buildings, from houses to skyscrapers, are put together. It really doesn’t matter what stage of construction the building is at either for me to pause to take a look. I like to see things like the depth of the footings or the size of the columns and supporting beams or the length of the cantilevered balconies or how the wall framework will divide an empty space or how the roof structure will finish off the building.

    Constuction site

    Image source:Shutterstock

    While completed structures often look impressive, I find there’s more value in knowing how it all fits together (but that could be just me!). I think that’s why the practices of working out loud and showing your work appeal to me and I learn more from seeing how something was created as opposed to trying to figure it out when looking at the finished product.

    Working in the eLearning space I often see people sharing some great samples of work and many times I wonder:

    • How did they do that?
    • Where did their ideas come from?
    • How long did that take to create?
    • Why did they do it that way?

     

    I figure that I can’t be the only one who wonders these things and when someone shares this information, it’s like looking at their construction site and I’m happy to stop and take a look.

    I’ve shared the ‘how’ behind some of the demos I’ve created, some examples are here and here and here. I don’t do it all the time and on reflection, it’s because I can be so caught up doing the work that I forget about sharing the work at different stages. So, it’s a habit I need to develop to make it part of the work.

    From my experience, some ideas for showing your work are:

    • Start with something small; share a part of a project or a tip or a discovery you’ve made.
    • Find a method of documenting that works for you; it could be via blog post or a video or a photo or a tweet or a combination of these.
    • Don’t worry about what other people think; the aim is to make your tacit knowledge visible.
    • There’s no right or wrong way; I’m just making it up as I go but I do get ideas from what others do.

     

    If we make time to document our planning and construction phases and then make this information public, there’d be many more opportunities for others to learn from our experiences. It might just encourage them to share what they know too.

    After all, the best type of learning is when we learn from each other.