Amazon takes a Chinese bride

Amazon.com, one of the pioneer powerhouses of e-commerce, has joined the rush to gain a foothold in the booming China market. Amazon has bought China's Joyo.com, China's largest online seller of books, movies, music, and toys, for a mere $75 million.

The Chinese online population is growing at an astonishing rate. Already at 80 million, it's expected to hit 100 million active at-home users by year end. That's closing fast on the US (pretty much plateaued at 130 million) and way ahead of numbers three and four Japan (34 mil) and South Korea (31 mil).

The days when English was the dominant language (and the latin alphabet the dominant form) of the Internet and of e-commerce are over. It's time to install all of those foreign language packs that allow your computer to show other writing systems without all the error messages.

Maybe babelfish and similar instant sort-of-translation services will finally come into their own. Enter Amazon.com's founder Jeff Bezos into babelfish, translate him to traditional Chinese, and then translate that back to English and you get an auspicious "Outstanding husband Bezos". I wish the happy couple well!

M-learning: If God is on your mobile phone, why not phonics?

Wired magazine has been tracking the innovative uses that various religious groups are finding for cell phones. If you are a Muslim, your phone can point you to Mecca. Catholics can get daily SMS text messages from the Vatican (just send the text message POPE ON to 24444 if you are a US subscriber of AT&T Wireless, Verizon Wireless or Cingular -- but it costs a significant 30c per day). For $3.25 a month, you can even get a daily multimedia spiritual thought delivered to your phone by Deepak Chopra. Subscriptions to these services are booming, which proves that, given a willing target group, even low-tech mobile phones can overcome their obvious limitations and be used for learning.

I have said before that m-learning using phones as internet access points may be a way for developing nations to bypass the infrastructure barriers to "traditional" e-learning. When you consider that one of the most basic requirements in such counties is literacy training, and that the elements of such training are text and audio, the phone is potentially a great way to deliver both in small learnable doses. What better way to learn the alphabet than on a device that is with you all the time and which can give you crystal-clear audio while showing you text?

Phonics on the phone? All that is needed is someone to sponsor it. If such learning were available on an 800 number, paid for by the government or some corporate sponsor, people would call in. If the learning bytes were transmitted to subscribers as storable SMS-plus-audio (MMS or multi media message service), that might be even cheaper. Or if simple phonics learning games designed to be downloadable to phones were available, they'd be used.

Governments (and those like the World Bank who nudge them) need to get more creative and less traditional, more pragmatic and less dogmatic, in the way they think about solving their educational problems. In the internet era of rapid prototyping, nobody builds massive oil tankers when a fleet of cheap inflatable high-speed boats can accomplish most of their goals. Sometimes a little bit of success right now can contribute dramatically to the success of The Big Plan long-term.

E-commerce conversion rates are rising

In an upcoming press release on their Q2 2004 E-Commerce Site Trend Report, DoubleClick is reporting an increase in online purchasing behavior. DoubleClick is the dominant player in online ad-serving -- when you see an ad on your screen, chances are it's been put there by a DoubleClick server, often in response to a cookie that they put on your system earlier. While not advertisers themselves, or even an ad agency, they are in the business of encouraging clicks, tracking them, and analysing their impact.

There was a sense that with the growing saturation of online advertising, and the growth of ad-blocking software, the effectiveness of online advertising would decline. Seems like that is not happening yet. DoubleClick says that the e-commerce conversion rate is increasing, up 14 percent to a significant 5 percent of ad-clickers actually making a purchase.

Average order values are up too, by 15 percent. How big is the average online purchase? In Q2 2004, it was $134. Now averages are misleading because they don't tell you anything about volumes of purchase at different price points: a thousand people buying a DVD on Amazon plus one person buying a Ferrari on eBay will result in an average spend that is not representative of either segment. But as an aggregate trend it does indicate a greater level of economic activity online, and that's encouraging to online marketers.

If you have ever wondered about how closely your online behavior is being monitored by unseen eyes, here's some data to feed your paranoia. DoubleClick says that those visiting sites spend on average the same amount of time per visit as last quarter, but hit eleven pages, up from ten, in each visit. And they put items in the cart but abandon the cart without making an actual purchase 24 percent more often.

The conclusion is that online visitors to a site are behaving with less caution. More confident visitors who are better practiced at finding the stuff they are interested in make for a faster-moving target audience whose attention is harder to grab. Designing the selling functionality and visual pull of your site continues to be a growing challenge for e-marketers.

Book me a passage to India

Offshoring accelerates

Time was when going off-shore was what companies did to avoid taxes. Now everyone is doing it to cut labor costs, improve customer service, and speed time to market.

The need for English-fluent skilled IT workers in the 1980s led US companies to recruit from India. But that was fraught with complications. The H1B visa system that allows an annual quota of tech-workers into the US was inadequate, and there were growing political pressures from American workers fearful of their jobs being stolen by those foreigners. So US companies turned the solution on its head. Why bring Indian workers here and pay them American wages, when you can hire them in Mumbai at a fraction of the cost? And why do this for only the proportion that used to be foreign – get rid of all your US tech workers and replace them all offshore.

There was for a time some kind of social conscience which slowed this process. On my arrival in the US in 1998 I suggested using India-based programmers in my fledgling company, and received such scornful reactions that I never raised the issue again. Now most of the e-learning development work that I used to do is done in India.

I mentioned recently how Reuters is getting some of its editorial writing done offshore. Now this article from the New York Times talks about how the financial sector is offshoring increasingly sophisticated business functions to India – a trend which will cost American bankers 2.3 million jobs, but save banks and securities companies (and their shareholders) billions.

Obviously, cost savings are a major driver. According to Celent Communications ,

“in 2003 the average M.B.A. working in the financial services industry in India earned 14 percent of his American counterpart's wages. Information technology professionals earned 13 percent, while call center workers who provide customer support and telemarketing services earned 7 percent of their American counterparts' salaries.”

You can’t ignore savings of 80 percent or more on your payroll. And because labor is so cheap, companies can afford to get work done faster. Time to market can be cut, as can response rates on customer service issues. As a shareholder in a company that is offshoring, you are smiling all the way to the bank.

India keeps graduating more technical people than the US, so the “economic discontinuities” are likely to be around for a while. US enrollments in computer science degree programs are apparently down 30-40 percent on 1999. A June 19 article in the LA Times said computer science enrollments at MIT dropped 44% from 1999 to 2003. "The decline has hit just about every type of school. At UC Berkeley, the number of students enrolling in computer science and computer engineering dropped 41% in that period. Enrollments at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta fell 45%. Nationwide, new enrollments are at 1996 levels — and few expect them to rebound soon."

In fact, we may be reaching a tipping point, where Americans don't want to study computer science because they don't think there is local employment or a career future in it any more. But, as happened in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and other economies boosted by low labor costs, India’s cost advantage will eventually be eroded by rising demand and growing affluence. By that time, will China be waiting in the wings to suck the remaining knowledge-worker jobs from the US?

From a purely self-serving perspective, what are the implications for OD&T professionals in the US? Do we gear up to train people in India? Do we relocate our corporate campus? Or do we get “offshored” ourselves? A lot of Indian companies are pitching themselves in the US as “India’s leading e-learning development company” – I get calls or e-mails from at least two a day looking to “partner” with me. I’m predicting that the next Indian industry to take off as an offshoring solution will be not just e-learning development, but corporate training, period. If you’re not in bed with an Indian company by that time, you might be sleeping on the street.

The internet (sic) gets ordinary

Wired Magazine, the real journal of the e- generation, has formally downgraded (or promoted) the Internet to the internet. This is major news.

In the past I have been an annoying stickler for correcting the spelling of anyone who slipped and used a lower-case "i" in Internet or a lower-case "w" in Web. These are, after all, formally defined terms. An internet is any collection of networks that communicate with each other. The Internet is the collection of networks that communicate via TCP/IP.

But if Wired is acknowledging that the Internet has become such an ordinary mainstream part of daily life that it no longer warrants a capital, I'll stop annoying people and follow suit.

Wired has also de-capitalized the Web and the Net. A web is a web. The Web is technically all the resources and users on the Internet that use HTTP. But both the Web and the Internet have overflowed their earlier boundaries, and today increasingly diverse access points and protocols co-exist in a bigger information/communication environment that I think of as the metanet. The World Wide Web Consortium now defines the Web as "the universe of network-accessible information, an embodiment of human knowledge." So I guess that's just about everything.

Removing the initial caps is in effect a promotion, because it acknowledges the relative ubiquity and mainstream-ness of the medium. As Wired puts it: "in the case of internet, web and net, a change in our house style was necessary to put into perspective what the internet is: another medium for delivering and receiving information. That it transformed human communication is beyond dispute. But no more so than moveable type did in its day. Or the radio. Or television."

How mainstream is the internet these days? At least in the US, it's routinely used for every day tasks, without the attendant anxiety or wow-factor that was there a few years ago. We use the internet without really being aware of what we are doing -- rather like the way we throw a light switch and just expect electricity to do its thing.

According to a report released a couple of days ago by the Pew Internet and American Life Project: "Fully 88% of online Americans say the Internet plays a role in their daily routines. The activities they identified as most significant are communicating with family and friends and finding a wealth of information at their fingertips. And 64% of Internet users say their daily routines and activities would be affected if they could no longer use the Internet."

Those in learning and development who still maintain that the internet is a poor substitute for face to face communication might be swayed by the 85 percent of Americans who say the internet is a good way to communicate or interact with others.

But the study also reveals that while the internet is the preferred medium where efficiency is important, most people still default to doing most things the real-world way.

Global e-commerce turns 10

E-commerce has been here for a whole ten years, according to this article on CNET. A classmate of the founder of NetMarket purchased a CD online on August 11 1994, using a secure commercial transaction system for the first time, and kicked off a change in the way the world does business. This year, according to Forrester Research, online retailers in the US alone will take in $144 billion, making one dollar out of every fifteen spent an online dollar.

Whether it was NetMarket or the Internet Shopping Network that actually processed the first secure credit card purchase on the Internet in August 1994 doesn't really matter. That the US government only legally permitted commercial use of the Internet in 1995 is irrelevant.

What is significant is the pace at which this has happened, and the pace at which it is accelerating. In the US, e-commerce revenues this year will be 27 percent more than last year. In other countries the growth rate is higher. Despite anxieties about online security, the convenience of doing business online continues to drive more consumers to their browsers, and stimulates more businesses to do a better job of providing their products and services online.

The globalization of the Internet consumer base has prompted unprecedented attention to global e-commerce among sellers. American corporations are currently spending an average of $500,000 on globalizing their sites for every billion dollars of corporate revenue. How global is that Internet user base these days?

According to A.C. Nielsen and others, the US has about 139 million active at-home Internet users, followed by China with 80 million. Japan had 34 million, South Korea 31 million, Germany 27 million, the UK 21 million, France 14 million, and Brazil 12 million. The growing powerhouse, of course, is China which will have 100 million Internet users by year end. And the absolute numbers don't tell the whole story -- it is the proportion of the population that really determines how intensively the technology influences business culture.

Remember the clicks-vs-bricks arguments of a few years ago, and the assertions that retailers could never make a profit online? Mere teething troubles and learning curves. When e-commerce actually matures (if ever), those early analyses will seem so short-sighted. The same will be true of the superstitious early attitudes to most aspects of e-business and e-learning.

Forbes gets radical. Reuters too

Forbes is pioneering something quite out of character. Old-school conservative journalism is not supposed to meddle with leading edge thinking. But Forbes.com has taken a look at how much money Google makes out of selling keywords to trigger ads in its search engine and is going one better: advertisers can now buy in-context in-editorial keywords in Forbes articles that pop up small ads when readers roll over them with a mouse. Readers can identify an ad-linked word by its double-underlining.

There are examples in this Forbes article about another radical journalistic move, this time by Reuters. Reuters is outsourcing to India. Nothing new there. But what is being outsourced is surprising: it's journalism, and journalism about American companies at that.

Time was when to do secondary research you had to be on the ground in the area. The Internet and low-cost telecommunications have eliminated that geographic requirement. It seems these Indian journalists will be restricted to data gathering and graphics, at least for now. But I imagine that in the near future we'll be seeing feature articles coming from India-based writers. Maybe they'll be less tainted by US partisanship. And the eloquence of writing in American journals may finally start to improve...

The big issue in training's future

At a recent conference I heard somebody say, without even a hint of irony, “Change management is like so twenty minutes ago.” One of the essential big-picture issues that T&D has to deal with, now and increasingly so in the next few years, is managing change and its repercussions – for the organization and for training itself. It’s oxymoronic, and dangerous, that change has become a cliché.

The fact that change is so talked about should not dull our senses to the rapidly dissolving conceptual foundations on which nearly every job, department, division, organization, and industry is built. Change management used to mean dealing with significant strategic one-time adjustments in an organization, such as mergers, relocating, or “downsizing”. Now change is altogether different. It’s pervasive, relentless, unpredictable, non-linear, and frighteningly fast. Remember the 1970's arcade game Space Invaders? OK, how about Doom3? The more attackers you shoot down, the more come at you, faster and faster, until inevitably you just cannot keep up. Game over. Welcome to 21st century business. Your only salvation may lie in collaborative teamwork.

Because the landscape is changing so rapidly, opportunities and threats are often first identified as they recede in the rear-view mirror. By the time we have configured our business to exploit an opportunity, it’s gone. By the time we have developed a training course to address an issue, it’s no longer important or it has a completely different context.

Training departments used to be able to take the time to do skills audits and gap analyses, put together relatively stable and sound annual plans, and invest in building solid training solutions for identified problems. You could take one hundred hours to develop one hour of training product, knowing that what you produced would be relevant and effective for long enough to generate a healthy ROI. While that may still be true for certain core training needs, it is not true for training in those areas where a company’s differential advantage is generated and sustained. I am not just talking about the “sharp ends” of the business; I’m talking about the inherent smartness of the business.

Individual employees and entire companies need to be better able to anticipate, generate, or react to change. That means making them smarter, faster, more flexible, more synergistic. So training’s role, in part, needs to be more developmental. Identifying and building the analytical thinking, communication, and decision-making skills in individuals at all levels, as well as in teams and business units, is becoming more vital than ever.

It's not enough to re-think training as "learning", important as that shift is. To stay relevant and effective, T&D must itself change its perceptions, processes, and outputs. It has to be pro-active, which means being a formative part of company thinking, rather than an after-the-fact service provider to the business. Training is not a medication to be administered after diagnosis. It’s not a diet or an exercise regime to achieve fitness. It should be an integral part of the organizational DNA that creates and sustains a healthy metabolism.

Training professionals have to be willing to change their perceptions of what they do and of what “good practice” is. The well-designed polished course may not be relevant. Training departments as gatherers, re-formulators, and disseminators of skills and knowledge may no longer be relevant. Adjusting Training’s own processes to be more anticipatory and more rapid in response is critical. Collapse or eliminate the course development lead-time; create dynamic learning processes that leverage the skills and experiences of participants; integrate SMEs and managers into the actual learning process; lose the notion of training as a series of products and recast it as an integrated collection of perpetually evolving processes.

These are not idealistic conceptual daydreams – they are essential, urgent priorities.

The wireless broadbandwagon rolls on

Digital Media Europe is reporting that the city of Preston in the UK has gone wireless. And Nantucket Island is giving one megabit-per-second WiFi access to residents and visitors over an area of 800 acres. These hot-zones are just the latest in a growing tidal wave of wireless-ness that started in the US with a few hot-desk offices and a few wireless home networks. Then a couple of far-thinking university campuses went wireless so students could access the Web, the Internet, e-mail, online communities, and collaborative learning tools without having to find somewhere to physically jack into the campus intranet.

Then Starbucks put WiFi hotspots in its coffee shops to attract people in to check their e-mail (and buy an espresso). Then hotspots went into airport lounges. Now McDonalds is putting hotspots in its outlets; hotel chains and conference venues are becoming wireless zones; and many industrial parks, corporate campuses and town centers have joined the bandwagon. It is relatively cheap and easy for a business to set up a WiFi hotspot, and users cover the operating costs. And it gives a competitive edge to businesses trying to attract customers.

What is remarkable about this is how fast it has happened. From nowhere, WiFi became a $7 billion business in 2003. A year ago there were 28,000 hotspots around the world (12,000 of them in the US). WiFi was still young. A mid-2003 MORI survey in the UK revealed that while one in three people knew what a WiFi hotspot was, most had no idea at all:
5 percent of all respondents thought it was a nightclub, while 10 percent of single respondents identified it as a nightclub
2 percent of all respondents thought that it was something smelly that has been left out in the sun for too long
2 percent thought that it was a new hi-fi
1 percent thought that it was a posh hot tub
1 percent thought that it was a sunbed
1 percent thought that it was a microwave ready meal
1 percent of married respondents identified it as trouble with the wife
10 percent of 15-to-24-year-olds in the UK thought a Wi-Fi hotspot was an area with good mobile phone reception.

An ABI research forcast 200,000 hotspots worldwide by 2007, with growth in Europe outstripping that in the US.

In parts of the US, WiFi devices are becoming as ubiquitous as mobile phones (true, you can surf the web on those too, and you don't need to be near a WiFi hotspot to do it -- though WiFi mobile phones have recently made an appearance on the market). All you need is a wireless device, say a laptop with a wireless card (pretty much standard in most laptops today) or a wireless PDA, and you have instant high-speed access to the Internet. You also need an account with the hotspot provider. But with hotspots mushrooming, competition is pushing down already low access costs.

To find out if you are in range of a wireless LAN, you simply have to turn on your laptop, PDA or pocket PC. But that can be awkward. So now you can get a key-ring size device that acts like a WiFi geiger counter, detecting nearby hotspots. All for less than $30.

This little device can't tell you anything about the networks in your vicinity, other than direction and signal strength. So an alternative is to download for free a copy of NetStumbler, which will tell you a great deal about the wireless LANs within range, and help you log on. NetStumbler is an indispensible piece of software for avid Wardrivers -- sort of modern-day train-spotters who like to roam around finding and documenting available wireless networks. But be warned, it is illegal to use a corporate LAN without authorization, and hopping on to check your e-mail is as illegal as hopping on to steal confidential information.

When the latest WiFi standard, 802.11i, rolls out in a month or two, many of the security fears that have kept corporate LANS hardwired will disappear, further boosting the number of wireless devices capable of using public WiFi hotspots. Corporate wireless network admins are getting a lot smarter about security. Eventually home users will too. (Incidentally, the easiest way to hide your home wireless network from wardrivers is to change default password settings and disable SSID broadcast, which stops your system from responding to broadcast probes).

Personalization vs. Privacy

A recent study. by ChoiceStream shows that most Internet users (81% of them) want some kind of personalization when online, and they are willing to sacrifice some privacy to get it.

As the volume of information and complexity of services on the Web keeps expanding, personalization is one way to shut out much of the clutter. If a site you are visiting recognizes you, it can steer you to those content elements that match your interests or demographics. But the downside is that the site needs to collect and apply your personal data in order to do a decent job.

It can get this data in a number of ways: by asking you for demographic, preference, and personal information, such as age, name, location, likes and dislikes; by retrieving records of your past transactions, such as things you bought, credit card used, mailing address provided; or by tracking your behavior and recording the site you came from, the things you looked at, the time you spent, the words you searched for. Most sites do all three. Some (such as Yahoo! and Google) aggregate the data to refine their systems; others (Amazon) use it for personalization; still others may compile information that is provided to business partners.

Not surprisingly, most surfers are willing to trade personal information for personalization: 64% are willing to provide preferences and 56% are willing to provide demographics. But people are (quite rightly) wary of being tracked and profiled -- only 40% said they would trade tracking for personalization. People still want to be in control of what information is collected. And, according to the study, the older you get, the more wary you are.

The issue of privacy is big in online retailing, but in e-learning it is not yet an issue. It's an area where the individual provides a great deal of personal information and is tracked in detail, yet there is rarely any personalization payoff. When I talk to training professionals and ask them about their privacy policies and practices and what they are doing about data mining or data security, it's astonishing how often I get a blank look in response. It may take a couple of high-profile cases before privacy in e-learning gets the attention it deserves.

Online Advertising Still Underused

One of the key factors in deciding where to place advertising is the size of the audience. You would expect a medium's share of ad spend to match its share of audience, more or less.

But despite the Internet's being a mainstream medium these days, and despite its ability to host increasingly sophisticated creative product, it is still not attracting as much advertising spend as its traffic would warrant. According to this article, in the UK the Internet accounts for 12 percent of media consumption, but nets less than 3 percent of advertising revenue. The mismatch is replicated in other countries. Arguably, the Internet is a less efficient medium, but not to that extent.

In part, this discrepancy may be because many advertising creative professionals and media buyers still don't really "get it". In part it is because it is so hard to target specific audiences. To many, Internet "traffic" is too much of a moving target, so they concentrate on the equivalent of outdoor ads -- buying keywords on Google or placing banners on portals -- in the hope of being noticed in passing by someone relevant. Others focus on pop-ups and pop-unders, in the hope of annoying people into doing business with them. Traditionalists will place context-relevant ads alongside targeted editorial in online magazines, newspapers, and (increasingly) blogs.

Another cause for the lower than expected investment in online advertising could well be the ready availability of detailed performance metrics relative to those available in other media. What was the ROI on that spot on TV last night? Hard to say. What was the ROI on that banner ad in the Washington Post Online article? We had a 2.7% click through rate and 0.3% conversion.

If you don't know how badly or well you are doing, you don't have too many reservations about staying the course. Poor performance is much more measurable online, so it can be a discouraging medium to invest in. Though I imagine if it were possible to accurately measure performance in other media the numbers might raise eyebrows.

IBM outsources to South Africa

This Computer Weekly news item says that IBM is using its operation in South Africa as a place to outsource to as a back-up to India. The skill sets and native English are every bit as good as in India, and the cost of that skilled labor is currently comparable.

The added advantage is that it is in the same time zone (more or less) as Europe, so communication is easier. (At least in theory -- the Internet infrastructure is nowhere near as developed as in India, as anyone who has ever waited minutes for a South African Web page to load will verify). An obstacle to any large-scale outsourcing to SA down the line may be the small size of the qualified workforce compared with India, which graduates 170,000 engineers a year (70 percent more than the US!).

But with recent government moves within South Africa to "partner with" India and Brazil in fields like e-learning, there may be some telecoms infrastructure progress in the pipeline, and maybe even some accelerated government investment in technology training. There's an interesting article on this in AllAfrica.com's archive, but irritatingly you can't get to it unless you are a paying subscriber (didn't that business model disappear years ago?).

Visualizing data

There is more data being produced today than anyone can get a useful handle on (more information has been produced in the past five years than in the total of all of previous human history). Hence the growing interest in new ways to search it and understand it, and the emergence of increasingly sophisticated data mining tools. If the Google IPO is any indicator, bringing clarity into info-chaos has real value.

Now, in conjunction with The Hive Group -- vendors of visual approaches to business analytics -- NewsIsFree has come up with a visual map of the news. You can decide on criteria such as popularity or recentness to determine size and color of the items represented.

The Hive Group is the same company that produced the visual map of a Google search. It's a great start, but the map is somehow not very helpful. The only dimensions you have to indicate importance are size and color. A 3D fly-through approach would be much more useful, but of course you'd need a high-end machine and some very potent software to do it.

Java aps have their limitations when it comes to data visualization. I like the interactivity of blogalization from TouchGraph, and their more elaborate ThinkMap and InXight products are very cool. At the high end of the price range (we're talking five to six figures) are the integrated 3D systems from companies like Visual Sciences (not strong on Web presence themselves but very hot at helping others see their online performance using real-time collection, processing, analysis and visualization of their data).

I have always wondered about the disconnect between the poor graphics quality that we accept in our business apps and the high graphics quality we demand in our entertainment apps. With this week's launch of Doom 3, the gap just widens. We don't live in a 2D world, and our data is multidimensional. Yet most of us still try to understand it by pulling it into flat gray tables in Access. The dimensions by which you analyse data usually determine the nature of the insights you will extract; it's typically impossible to discover unexpected relationships of any sophistication when your lens is a spreadsheet.

I'd like to think that the next great leap forward in tools to mine the metaNet will be multi-dimensional, un-preconditioned, and creative, with a touch of real-world, real-time insight thrown in, all very graphically rich. Maybe that's a blogger, with a Web-cam.

Avatars behaving badly

Two pieces of déjà vu hit me today, reminding me how ideas get constantly recycled, and how long it can take for some technologies to find a viable application. (Remember "push" technology of ten years ago? Now it's back as RSS). 

First, out of the US election hullabaloo came JibJab media’s Bush-Kerry cartoon, taking the Internet by storm, and racking up 2.5 million hits a day. It’s silly, sophomoric, satirical, and very cool. Second, out of the UK comes the news that customer-friendly ATMs that actually use your name on-screen are finally going to make an appearance in that traditionally techno-skeptic land across the pond.

The connection? In the mid 1990’s I was running a company in London that was pushing the envelope in video-realistic 3D avatar technology. With just two photographs of a person we could create a life-like 3D virtual character that worked on an ordinary PC or over the Internet, complete with facial expressions, moving eyes, blinking, and rather good automatic lip-synching to a voice track.

My goal was to use these avatars in training games, simulations, and online communities (we were working with Worlds Inc. in San Francisco), but in order to pay for their development I was looking for other applications. I tried pitching the talking head to NCR for use in ATMs – it would pick up a text feed, convert it to voice, and synchronize the lips and facial expressions of the ATM character, and address the customer by name. But, partly because it was so real, the effect was a little creepy and developers were not interested. Eight years later ATMs are still text-based, but are finally acknowledging the customer by name.

What about Bush-Kerry? We exhibited at the E3 video games expo in 1996, and to promote the technology we put together a set of give-away screensavers that satirized the candidates in the then-current elections. “Raucous Caucus” featured 3D avatars of Clinton and Dole debating and performing in suitably scandalous sophomoric fashion. Had the Internet been bigger at the time, it would have been huge. Or maybe not – our technology was generations ahead of the Bush-Kerry cartoon du jour, but our content was nowhere near as clever. Talent trounces technology, and substance beats style every time.

One thing that became really obvious as a result of all of the avatar work, was that believability is less about appearance than about behavior. In simulations, a very large portion of your budget can go to replicating look, when getting feel right pays much bigger dividends. People will forgive appearances if the behavior is realistic; but no amount of visual gloss can make up for unconvincing behavior.

Google and substance over style

The Google IPO continues to make headlines. At the anticipated top price of $135 per share (to be determined by an auction), Google will be the most expensive IPO ever, possibly opening at a value of $36 billion. That will make it about the same value as Yahoo and nearly twice as big as Amazon. But when you look at “traditional” corporations, you realize the scale of this event: Google’s market value may be nearly 50% more than General Motors’.

At more than a hundred times its earnings per share, Google’s not a bargain stock. And it’s hard to see how it can be sustained long-term. Yes, they have a great search engine that lots of others are trying to beat, but other search engines are not Google’s only competitor. After all, Google is not really in the search-engine business. It’s mainly in the business of delivering audiences to advertisers. There are a lot of innovators out there trying to grab that traffic.

Most of them are trying to use media-rich content to build audiences for their advertisers, like the magazines and television channels have done before them. Google’s Spartan interface is interesting – it doesn’t need rich media because its “content” (search results) is compelling, customized, timely, relevant, and uncluttered. The same could be said for most RSS feed readers. Those in the e-learning and e-marketing fields for whom style is more important than substance really should take note.

The future of e-learning

Today's newsletter from the UK's TrainingZone featured an article by Amy Finn of Centra, talking about trends in e-learning.

I agree completely with much of what she says, but disagree strongly on parts of it. Such is e-learning..

The industry latched onto “e-learning” as a term a few years ago. But I think it needs to go back to something like “technology-enhanced learning” because e-learning has come to mean (in common use) only a narrow part of the spectrum – usually courses online or live Web-conferencing. The author says that e-learning is here to stay, but it's not. As a term it will die out rapidly (it is already slipping from prominence in the US and Canada) as people realize what a poor descriptor it is of the wide range of things that are happening with technological backing. And as a concept it is evolving so rapidly in so many directions that the e-learning of last year is so different from the technology-enhanced learning of this year, that you can’t really even compare them.

I also don’t buy the author's notion of "e-learning as a business strategy". E-learning will not “continue to become a driving force in business and industry”. Performance improvement may become a driving force, but e-learning is merely a means. And it will not be that high a profile anyway, because there are many other things which feed into performance improvement. E-learning cannot be a business strategy in itself. Learning should be driven by business strategy, and the appropriate mix of available resources, human and technological, should be deployed to support that business strategy.

That is not to say that learning professionals should not have a seat at the business strategy table – they are appallingly under-represented in my view. But I think we need to think beyond the manifestation of technology-enhanced learning when we look at what is really strategically vital to an organization. The view that “smart organisations know that eLearning is a strategic solution that must be deployed throughout their organization” is stopping short of the mark. Smart organizations know that LEARNING gives them a strategic edge, and should be open to any technology based solution that sharpens or sustains that edge.

The author says there are three elements of the e-learning universe (technology, content, and services), but she left out two that are vital:  processes and people. It’s not simply about technology, content, and services. Admittedly, the lines between these elements get pretty blurred at times, but I believe that the architecture of learning processes is independent of technology and content. And the people that are to learn or provide the learning support are the most vital element in any technology-enhanced design. You are not deploying technology, you are deploying an enhanced capacity to improve performance, and the motivation to do so.

On blended learning, we are on the same page. In my view, all learning is blended. Always has been, always will be. There is very little that any of us learn exclusively through one medium. Blended learning in the “e” sense of the term has often been very successful and continues to improve. This is not because the technology is better, but because those who architect the “formal” blended learning processes are designing learning experiences that map more closely to the way people learn “informally”. We need to see more seamless transition from learning experience to workplace and back, as well as among elements of learning. Blending formal learning experiences with actual work activities and with informal learning processes -- that is integrated learning! Sadly, accountants are the enemy of progress here, because the less discrete an element is, the harder it is to cost it or to calculate an ROI.

Amy Finn's LMS comments are spot-on. The LMS is only part of any solution.  And the same is true of LMS standards such as SCORM. You can paint yourself into a very expensive corner if you view e-learning exclusively through the capabilities of your LMS. Unfortunately, that’s what has happened in many US corporations, and much evolution in e-learning is now on hold while those corporations wait for the paint to dry.

Finally, the author concludes that how your organisation will accept the “new paradigm of e-learning” is key. But it’s not a new paradigm. Paradigms are easily defined, relatively constant, and consequently easy to sell. What organizations have to buy into today is rolling change, constant innovation, continuous revolutionary prototyping. That’s a hard sell to senior executives who view the world through locked-in spreadsheets, annual budgets, formal ROI calculations, inflexible perceptions, and hard-baked ideas about the world they operate in. Breaking through those barriers is our biggest challenge!

In Defense of Emergent Learning

In the E-literate blog, Michael Feldstein has recently had a couple of jabs at the burgeoning interest in emergent learning, as enthusiastically promoted by Jay Cross and others. I suspect that he’s overthinking it and just doesn't get it.

He says “When people talk about “emergent learning” these days, this is not generally what they mean. What they generally mean is some form of rapid consensus-building in which a group of people can share observations and make coordinated decisions without any one person filling the role of executive command and control. “ He goes on “Nevertheless, if we want to figure out how the concept of emergence can (and can’t) be applied to the domains of group decision-making, then we need to get it through our individually thick heads that peer-to-peer education in a networked environment is not the same thing as emergence.”

He’s using “emergent” in the Steven Johnson sense of the increasing collective smartness of dumber parts, as in smart hives of dumb bees or smart brains of dumb neurons. And by that rather narrow use of the term, he’s right – emergent learning is something of an oxymoron. But “emergent learning” is not used in that sense, at least I have never heard it used that way. Those talking about emergent learning are not talking exclusively about how groups of people get smarter by being connected with each other, though it’s part of the discussion. And they are certainly not talking about rapid consensus-building.

More typically, they are using emergent in the sense that most dictionaries would define it – coming into being or coming into notice. What they are looking at is how emerging technologies (and unexpected applications of them) are changing learning strategies, learning organization, learning implementation, and generally changing the way we go about learning as individuals and as organizations. Learning, and the way it is promulgated, is evolving visibly as it becomes a persistent survival skill. And we need to understand what is happening so that we can recognize it, influence those developments, or leverage any emergent opportunities. (That is, opportunities that are coming into being or becoming recognizable). One of the challenges of emergent learning (and I guess of business generally these days) is to recognize what among all of the chaos coming at us is significant and to exploit it before it is a speck in the rear view mirror.

One of the interests of emergent learning does have to do with connectedness, leveraging the power of collective knowledge and experience in ways that were not possible before, discovering how technology-enhanced collaboration can help to improve performance, and trying to make sense of the way technologies are impacting informal learning.

But I don’t think anyone is looking to emergent learning as a way to create some kind of hive-like smartness in worker bees. The opposite is true – collaborative technologies allow individuals and cross-discipline teams to become more valuable and more prominent, as the employing hive and its collective knowledge become less structured, less hierarchical, and more porous.

Are virtual workers damaging their careers?

This article from Information Week reports a Stanford study that claims virtual workers fear they may be making themselves redundant. First, they fear that by giving away all their hard-won knowledge and insights they diminish their personal worth. Second, they fear that being virtual reduces their ability to learn from their peers.
 
Both notions are false, being based on false presumptions about virtual teams. Or, should I say, being based on false presumptions about how virtual teams have to be. Virtual collaboration has surely come a long way since the days of client-server spoke-and-hub workgroups.
 

Stanford's Margaret Neale is quoted as saying "If your knowledge, not to mention the tricks and tips it has taken years to learn, is deposited in a database for all to access, does the organization still need you?" But the essence of collaborative virtual groups is networked knowledge, not centralized knowledge. Putting knowledge into a central database is old-school library-think KM, which assumed that in order for knowledge to be available it had to be centralized, cataloged, and indexed.
 
And while you may be able to capture some of the knowledge of a virtual team in a database, the tacit or implicit knowledge -- that expertise derived from experience in applying explicit knowledge -- has proven very hard to capture in any formal, structured, or easily-usable way. You can't put it in a database. And even if you could, it would have a very short half-life because, unlike explicit knowledge, tacit knowledge evolves at the pace of the environment that spawns it.
 
The other notion, that by being virtual you lose the ability to learn from others, is equally odd. The fears of virtual workers may be real, and in many instances the way in which organizations structure and facilitate virtual work groups may validate those fears. But there is no reason why members of virtual teams cannot actually enjoy significant advantages over their office-bound counterparts. I'm not talking about the obvious things like convenience, time-saving, travel-saving and so on. I'm talking about the ability to accelerate your individual learning through exposure to a much more intimate, more diverse, more available set of communication relationships than you can ever have in a crowded meeting room. Not only do virtual team members get to be closer (in mind) to their colleagues, they get to share their own expertise and tacit knowledge in a way that is more direct, more attributable, and more visible than it might be in face-to-face meetings. How can this be bad for your career?
 

Margaret Neale comes up with this gem: "Technology has the potential to destabilize the relationship between organizations and employees" YES! And that, surely, is a good thing. The disintermediation of hierarchies of control, and the mutation of silos of knowledge into spheres of influence, are common themes in my presentations. It's happening, at a pace that scares those who use an organigram as a security blanket. But organizations need to understand it, embrace it, foster it, and try to influence it to their advantage, rather than fighting it, or worse -- denying that it is happening.
 

The Stanford report was put together by Margaret Neale (Professor of Organizations and Dispute Resolution at Stanford), Terri Griffith of the School of Business at Santa Clara University and John Sawyer of the College of Business and Economics at the University of Delaware. Their paper, titled "Virtualness and Knowledge in Teams: Managing the Love Triangle of Organizations, Individuals, and Information Technology," was published in the Stanford MIS Quarterly in June 2003. Why the report has only now hit the newswires is baffling.

 
 
 

How Web-savvy are your employees?

We have been providing e-learning courses in various areas of "Web savviness" for a few years now -- targeted primarily at the layperson -- and it is clear to me from the majority of learner reactions that (to most users) the Web is simply a tool based on magic. Not gee-wiz magic or scary magic, just plain old stuff-just-happens magic. People are curious to understand more about how it all happens, but rarely make the effort because they assume it is all too complex to get a handle on. When they get more comfortable with it, the light bulbs go off and they see the potential.

Just as there is a big difference between those who know and understand cars and those who simply drive them, I think there is a very wide "digital divide" between those who are Web savvy and those who simply use the Web a lot. Those for whom driving is a job know about vehicles, those who drive TO their job tend to be less interested. But the Internet pervades our jobs today, so understanding it is actually rather important. And I am not just talking about using search engines.
 
The complexity of the magic just gets harder to deal with as internetwoking rises above the Web and mutates into a bigger, less browser-centric environment of autonomous devices and mobile access points. Miniature RFID radio price tags on products in your supermarket; smartphones and smart vending machines; wireless hotspots; GPS chips in your car, your cellphone, and (if you believe the Mexican prosecutors) your arm; home appliances that talk to each other, and to you; and a million new implications for making ordinary business processes more efficient and organizations more competitive.

For companies, having most of their employees with a superficial (or superstitious) grasp of the wired world can be a significant handicap, or even a strategic threat. For individuals, this naïveté is not necessarily harmful, just inefficient. It is not till they get hit by their first virus, or find data or identities stolen, or see their role outsourced to someone who came up with a better way to do it, that both companies and individuals realize the value of being smarter. It is usually an expensive lesson.

Thinking outside the course

I have spent many years trying to get trainers to see the broader potential of the Web and to stop seeing e-learning merely as “courses online”. What is required is a conceptual breakthrough, not a bigger budget – indeed, creating dynamic e-learning experiences is often much cheaper than building "conventional" online courses. Naturally, “what” you are teaching and “who” you are teaching has a bearing on the learning models and media you will need to use, and equally obviously if you need to use simulations of software applications text is not going to be much help.

But there is no reason a company should delay providing e-learning till all of its technology choices have been made, and its tools and infrastructure purchased and implemented. In fact, purchasing your tools before you have any experience in designing and implementing e-learning on a shoe-string can cause you to make some expensive mistakes.
 
Striving for perfection in learning (particularly in e-learning) is admirable but irrelevant if your focus is on the tools instead of on the learning experience. Pedagogy idealogues are often way too willing to yield to technology idealogues. Your choice of learning model should dictate your choice of development tools, not the other way around. And if you don’t have or can’t afford the ideal tools your model calls for, instead of compromising on the model you should first try to compromise on the tools.  The test is always going to be what combination of learning model and development tools best achieves the learning objectives.

I simply don’t believe that creating an effective online or blended learning experience requires a complete dedicated e-learning technology infrastructure to be in place. And a major early investment in a particular toolset can cause tunnel vision, which is why I discourage it! Your learning strategy should accommodate revolutionary prototyping, in which you build and burn then re-build, starting small and working toward evolving a pragmatic set of intervention models. The ASTD forum that sparked this rant is a simple type of text-based dynamic online learning environment, as are discussion groups like trdev and ODnet, and blogs such as Internet Time. None of these require sophisticated technology infrastructures, or even much techno-competence, and the tools are often free. And, with a little creativity (not the visual kind, the learning structure kind), such tools can be used in whole or in part to rapidly build effective online learning solutions. Such solutions may not be what you want to stick with, but they can get you moving up the learning curve, and will inform the way you choose and use a more “technological” infrastructure in the medium term.

I certainly do not advocate the use of PowerPoint as an e-learning development tool in isolation (though it can be quite effective in WebEx-type scenarios). Nor do I advocate text-only as an ideal online learning medium. But I DO advocate using whatever tools you have at your disposal in whatever combinations if they will help to create a learning experience that will achieve its objectives.

Text-based page-turners revisited

Don’t confuse the medium with the message, or the expression with the experience.

Most first-generation e-learning out there is ineffective garbage. But the fault lies more with the design of the learning experience, than with the fact that the content is primarily accessed through text and images. I acknowledge the need to address learning needs and use effective means to do so. But I am just not so ready to throw text and images out the window as a foundation for the communication of knowledge. Build on that foundation by all means. But build on it with layers of useful learning experiences, not simply with more exotic media.

My previous PowerPoint comment was more about perceptions of the mode of instruction than about the tool itself. You can’t assume that anyone following a relatively linear mode of teaching is merely putting pictures and text on a screen. What matters is how mentally engaging the experience is, not whether its primary visual form is text and pictures. Further, you can’t assume that because “interaction” in the trivial sense that I hear most ISD people use it (animation, sounds, games, bright shiny objects) is absent from a particular experience, that the mind of the learner cannot be productively engaged with the subject matter. You can use text and images as a primary mode of communication, and reinforce it with real-world application exercises, practice, feedback and so on – and, more often than not, even in the most gratuitously lavish production, those vital activities tend to be briefed and de-briefed using (gasp) text!

Admittedly, it is harder to craft a good sentence than to code a jumping frog, but that’s no reason to dis the written word. Don’t knock the potential of text as a means of communication. It’s making a major come-back in people’s lives.

Creative use of existing technologies

There’s a real sense of elitist anti-powerpointism among people who think of themselves as e-learning professionals. But, really, if PowerPoint is considered good enough for 90% of ILT interventions, why have such disdain for that paradigm online? Just because you can do more in the way of multimedia and nonlinearity online doesn’t mean you should.

I have for years been advocating the use of simple, affordable, working, rapid-results familiar technologies in e-learning as a viable alternative to the “industry” dogma that if e-learning is not “produced” by instructional designers using proprietary tools it’s not good. Canned learning “products” may be appropriate for some subject matter, but for much of what people need to learn, there may be better, faster, cheaper ways to go.

Before qualified instructional designers get upset, I have no beef with that profession. But I suspect that many of the practices, if not some of the principles of ISD, as taught at any point in time, have a rather limited half-life in a field that is evolving as dynamically as the one we find ourselves in. In my view, e-learning has become a sort of self-sustaining pseudo-specialization, with barriers to entry built on sand by vendors and practitioners who really don’t want to have to perpetually reinvent themselves.

Quality learning is not about sophisticated tools, entertained learners, flashy production values, minutely mapped-out processes, or enhanced trainer job satisfaction. What matters is whether or not a learner achieves the desired improvement in performance as a result of the learning experience; and whether that experience was provided on time and within budget. Those last two items have often been major weaknesses in the concept of “e-learning as canned productions” – it can take months and tens of thousands of dollars to produce a single course. By the time it rolls out, the context has changed, the content is outdated, and you’ll never pump enough learners through it to justify the cost before you have to ditch it and start again.

If e-learning or blended learning is the right way to go in a particular instance, you can cut budgets and development times to negligible levels. Use established technologies like e-mail, PowerPoint, threaded discussions, chatrooms. Add to them relatively simple and free/cheap emerging tools like Web conferencing, online presentations, blogging, and social networking. Weave in people who are SMEs, expert practitioners, managers, or learner peers as mentors, facilitators, learning buddies, or devil’s advocates. Make learning part of the workplace and the workflow instead of some specialized activity that you have to escape from reality to engage in. Some tools that are useful are PowerPoint, Breeze (or its cheaper and instantly usable competitors like Aculearn), Spoke, Blogger, Moveable Type, iChat.

Without spending much time or money, you can create e-learning experiences and online learning environments that are cheap, rapidly developed, secure, highly targeted, always current, always relevant, and very effective. But to accomplish this you have to be willing to drop the notion that content and sculpted learning paths are king. And you have to be willing to yield to a less controlled learning process where “learning management” is less about micro-tracking learner activity and more about return on expectation, holistic and fuzzy as it may seem.

And vendors of products that produce and manage canned courses will not thank you for it :-)

Searching for an LMS?

Do not let 'what is available' dictate the functionality that you need. There are dozens (probably hundreds) of LMSs out there, and the one you pick should be the one that does the things you NEED it to do, not the one that does lots of things that are cool. So don't buy features, buy benefits that mean something to you. And don't fall into the trap of screening LMSs by factors that may not be important to you just because those factors seem to be in vogue right now (e.g. "if it's not SCORM conformant I won't consider it") .

Define your LMS needs based on the service you want to provide, the data you want to capture, the reports you want to run, the admin capabilities you want to use, the learning models and learner dynamics you want to support, the authoring systems and processes you want to use, the course vendors you want to be compatible with, the upgrade strategy you want to follow, and the ERP/HRIS systems you want to integrate with.

You'll find something off-the-shelf or ASP delivered that fits your needs. There is nothing especially complicated about coding an LMS, so I'd go beyond that and look at what it might take to develop your LMS internally, or what it might take to have an outside contractor build one for you. From what I have seen, implementing an LMS can cost more than the LMS itself, and the life expectancy of many branded LMSs is low -- in less than three years many companies find they need to get a new one. So having an internally developed LMS, and the expertise in your IT group to maintain and enhance it, may be a logical thing to do.

Opting for an ERP-systems provided LMS is another choice, but many training departments are wary of it. They are skeptical of the learning expertise of SAP or PeopleSoft. They assume they will be expensive and inflexible. And it will mean getting more involved with IT in the purchasing, implementation, and ongoing management phases than many traing people feel comfortable with. Get over it. In the medium term, learning management IS an ERP function, training needs to focus on its training expertise, IT needs to develop its e-learning systems expertise, and the sooner this all comes to pass the better.

Gender of voice-over and e-learning effectiveness

Do we use a male voice or a female voice in our e-learning? Which works better? The advertising industry has done a lot on the question of whether the gender of a voice impacts audience attitude and message retention. "Do we go male or female?" is a decision that has to be made every time an ad is produced. Unfortunately much of the generic gender research never gets published -- possily because of the (incorrect) idea that gender stereotyping is a precondition for such research. And much of the research is very specific to a product/campaign/audience.

It appears that matching the gender of a spokesperson to the gender of the target audience makes the spokesperson more aesily liked; but matching the perceived gender of the product advertised to its spokesperson's gender is more important. (see What if the Energizer Bunny were Female for some interesting insights).

But most studies that I have seen indicate no statistically significant difference between retention by an audience of one gender of content delivered by a voice of another, or the same, gender.

In my experience there are characteristics other than gender that play a much bigger role in engaging a learner audience. Things like dynamism, clarity, 'emotional bonding' with the content, enthusiasm, and perceived subject matter expertise are more important than whether it is a male or a female voice. Of course, so long as the content is not seen (rightly or wrongly) as inappropriate to the gender of the speaker-- sometimes playing to sexual stereotypes is simply helpful to all concerned.

I recommend you do what an ad agency would do, and what I have done often in the past. Select two male and two female voices, have them cut a short demo of the material, and test it on a small group from your target audience to see who they like. Not scientific, but cheap and effective!

Agreed, accent and age are also important. It all depends on the chracteristics of your target audience, and the nature of the content. For example, a British audience will often reject or challenge the validity of the content if it is narrated with an American accent. This sentiment will be stronger in interpersonal skills training than in software tools training. Regional accents also carry with them perceptions of the qualifications of the narrator.

I have found the best combination is a professional voice (preferably with radio broadcast experience) who is also a SME or experienced practitioner, or who at least understands the subject. Most voice-over artists have difficulty conveying expertise or passion for the subject, and can get annoyingly hammy when they try.

But only use someone with no professional voice experience if you are truly desperate.

Level 3 evaluation

We have seen a lot of level 3 success with a Problem Solving & Decision Making blended course that we built for Kepner-Tregoe. Throughout the pre-classroom online portion of the course, each learner interacts asynchronously with both his/her instructor and to a lesser extent with his/her manager. The interaction is around defining real workplace instances in which the rational thinking processes need to be applied, and in working through those applications.

Then, in the classroom portion of the course, those learner-specific workplace applications are practiced and coached intensively, and a few key projects for practically applying the skills are defined.

Then, after the classroom portion, each learner has several weeks in which to document those applications back at the workplace for both the instructor and the manager, who are available where necessary for further coaching and advice. The course is not completed till both sign off on those documented projects.

The great thing about doing this sort of thing online is that you can capture solid cases and metrics of practical workplace application, and demonstrate relevant and targeted value of the training immediately.

Of course, it's more difficult to do in some subject matters than others.

Ideas v. their description

An idea is not its description, despite what many writers may think. I am involved in the creation and communication of ideas -- have been for decades -- yet I have no difficulty in separating an idea from the words used to describe it. In fact, I am convinced that often the creator of an idea is not the best person to communicate it to a wider audience. I can think of countless instances from my own experience where truly gifted and brilliant thinkers (academics, marketing people, trainers, business leaders) have been atrocious communicators. And where truly gifted communicators have had atrocious ideas.

That's why the famous have ghost writers. That's why politicians have speechwriters. That's why entrepreneurs employ marketing communications professionals, who employ copywriters (not copyrighters :-)). It's a rare individual who has the talent to both create transformative ideas and to communicate them effectively - perhaps that is why such people become household names. But they are the exception, not the rule. If your words are worthy of your ideas, and vice versa, copyright fulfils its original function.

Ideas v. their packaging

I could re-express someone else's thought half a dozen times, never infringing on their copyright. Some rewrites might be more elegant or effective. My words might be those that carry their idea to a broad audience. Their words have died. But their idea lives on. They just don't get any credit for it. If the original ideas are good, they can successfully transcend the original means of expression -- to the detriment of the original thinker's ability to profit from them.

With rare exceptions, a significant idea exists independently of the medium in which it is expressed. But an inconsequential idea is dependent on its medium of expression. The harder it is to separate an idea from its expression, the less significant is the idea. No matter how many volumes you write about an
inconsequential idea, you cannot turn it into something important.

Copyright protects only your expression of the idea, whether it was your idea to start with or not. It does not protect the original thought. A transformative idea is inherently likely to be purloined and proliferated;
yet original thinkers continue to publish their work. If they did not, the world would be a much poorer place.

Storyboarding tools

I have worked with several storyboarding tools (especially when I was in the games development business), the most basic of which is StoryBoard Quick from PowerProduction.

Though it is designed for video production pre-viz work, it is cheap ($170?), flexible, really easy to use, and can be applied to just about anything. It's particularly useful if you want to sketch out ideas but (like me) can't draw -- it has a large library of characters and objects, and lets you import your own images and screen shots as well.

With a little imagination you can get a lot of storyboarding done in PowerPoint or Visio, so long as you are not looking for help with creating sketches or artwork. This is fine for mapping out simple process flows from one screen to another, using text, simple connectors and cut-and-paste screen captures. With Visio everyone has to have a copy of the program in order to read the files, and that can get expensive. Most people have PowerPoint already.

SMEs and Experienced Practitioners

There is a big difference between SMEs and experienced practitioners (EPs). SMEs are helpful in the creation of courses because their knowledge is realtively structured and easy to distill. You get content and theory from SMEs. EPs are helpful in the design of learning processes and in the implementation of learning because they have a wealth of practical experience and fuzzy tacit knowledge to draw on. You get context, relevance, and reality-focus from EPs.

I have used EPs very successfully as online instructors, particularly in reactive asynchronous or chatroom type modes where they add great value to the learning - I'd think twice about using them in ILT or Webcast modes.

E-learning development time

I am often asked what the ballpark development time is for an hour of e-learning. Industry “studies” like that from the E-learning Guild are not much help. According to a Guild study a while back, the average development period for an hour of “complex” e-learning (containing animation, streaming media, and navigation options) allegedly averages 276 hours. This is frankly absurd. But it points out the difficulty inherent in the question: what exactly are you talking about when you say "an hour of eLearning"? And what are you including in the concept of "development time?

This question was asked often in those early days of e-learning. Here's one of my responses, still valid today, to a similar question from 2001:

You are not going to find any meaningful ballpark figures for e-learning development costs, because e-learning can mean anything you want it to mean. This forum is a powerful dynamic e-learning medium, yet it costs virtually nothing to produce. A course full of spinning logos and burning icons and professional video can be a dire learning medium that cost millions to produce and gets outdated rapidly. Remember also that there are a range of hidden costs in any e-learning venture.

You have to define your individual learning objectives within the context of your overall learning service strategy. Then you have to define the learning model most appropriate to those objectives, given your environment (people, technology, existing classroom budgets, target learner sophistication). Only then, when you know what you want, should you start looking at cost. Internal development may be more expensive than outsourcing, if you factor learning curves into your costs. Send out an RFP to a few vendors and see what comes back, or just talk offline to people on this forum. The range of pricing may further frustrate you, but at least you will have a focused basis for budgeting.

There was a time when developers were happy to quote $10k per completed hour of e-learning. I still hear of vendors doing that, though now the hourly number is often $35k to $75k. But most people have realized how ludicrously risky that concept is, because development costs are not linear -- your first hour is most expensive, subsequent hours can get dramatically cheaper. And 'an hour' can be complex or simple in content, learner activity, technology, context, media used, and so on. An hour of simulation can cost 20 times an hour of text-based application instruction, and may be less effective in the given circumstance.

There are no short cuts – you really have to define the project, scope out the development plan, and cost it accordingly. Even then, you will find a huge range of pricing for the same project because not all vendors or internal development shops are the same. The big e-learning vendors are typically much more expensive (sometimes by a factor of ten or more) than a small specialized development shop that does not carry the same overhead. And, if you are happy to give the work to a multi-talented individual contractor, your costs drop even further. I have seen a client quoted as much as $600k and as little as $25k for the same project.

This has been a long answer to an apparently simple question. The short answer is that any study claiming to give a useful ballpark figure for the development cost of an hour of e-learning and an hour of classroom learning will never be useful to you in real-world budgeting.

In e-learning, as in life, what you want will always cost more than you can afford; what you need may often cost less than you are willing to pay.

A twist on copyright

Artists, writers, and inventors for thousands of years have known that, if not themselves wealthy, in order to pursue their muse they need a wealthy patron. Wealthy patrons are few and starving artists many, so only the most talented or profound find sponsorship. The lesser talents have to get a real job; the wealthy lesser talents indulge in vanity publishing. It's only in relatively recent times that marginal or niched creators have found viable markets for their efforts. And the Internet has made it even easier for such creators to market their wares, because the cost of production and distribution has dropped dramatically while finding a specialist market has become easier.

Musicians have always relied on a wealthy patron (a record company) to get their work leveraged commercially. Once wealthy themselves, many ditch the record company and seek to control/benefit from their creations directly. Those who can't find a patron in the first place are going online in droves, effectively vanity publishing their work but at very little cost to themselves and free to consumers. Those who strike a chord (if you'll excuse the expression) and find informal fame can jump to the next level and get a recording contract -- but in the beginning they actively encourage the free sharing of their work in order to promote their work. Think of it as an investment of opportunity costs in some hoped-for future return. And this despite the fact that in the music industry it is the recording itself (the expression of the idea) that has value.

In business writing it is surely the idea itself that is important; the expression of it (the published text) is less significant. If all you are doing is regurgitating old ideas and re-labeling old concepts, the text is all you have to sell, and with a bit of hype you probably can sell your books. If you are achieving conceptual breakthroughs with new ideas, you can probably change the world -- and your life -- but the words you use will be secondary to the concepts. That's why copyright is for the expression of ideas, not for ideas themselves. I'd rather produce one transformative idea in my lifetime than copyright a hundred inconsequential books.

Let me stress that I am not advocating un-attributed lifting of other peoples' writing at all. I believe in the value of protecting your intellectual property as far as sensibly possible: I have in the past gone to the expense of taking out several international patents for various software tools, and assert copyright of one form or another (mostly Creative Commons these days) on most things I publish. But you need to look honestly at what it is you are creating and decide how much of it comes from and belongs to you, and how much comes from and belongs to your world.

If creators jealously protect their words, they may condemn their ideas -- and themselves -- to obscurity. And does it make any difference in the world if a marginal thinker has the poor expression of old idea stolen by some other marginal thinker? Maybe, if you believe in the butterfly effect. Oops, maybe that's a copyrighted term. Better call my lawyer.

Protecting copyrights

Under copyright, you cannot protect an idea; you can only protect the specific expression of the idea. If there is only one way to express your idea, you have a happy situation. If there are other ways to express it, the value (to you) of your original idea is diminished. If someone else has a clearer or more compelling way to express the idea, your copyright probably was not worth much to start with.

Copyright law protects words and images, not concepts. Allowing others to quote you actually protects your original association with the idea; if others are not permitted to quote you (or if your expression of the idea is not in itself quote-worthy), they have to re-describe your concepts using their own words and images, and you stand more chance of losing any association with the idea.

As an author, you can choose to publish your work under a Creative Commons license. This selective assertion of copyright allows anyone else to copy, distribute, display and perform your work, and to make derivative works, so long as the original author is given credit, the use is non-commercial, and any derivation, alteration or extension of the work is only distributed under a Creative Commons license. Creative Commons has become popular among academics and researchers who need to share their work but where concerns about copyright and plagiarism used to hamper the sharing.

An idea unshared has little to no value. The more widespread an idea becomes, the greater its value becomes. Old-school hierarchical trickle-down of knowledge through formal publishing is a slow, expensive, and limiting model for the dissemination of ideas. Today, the networking of ideas using Internet-based vehicles is geometrically faster, cheaper, and more penetrating. And it provides a benefit that was also limited in the past -- an author can get instant feedback from a vast array of sources, making it easier for him/her to polish and improve on the original work.

Global e-learning best practices

When you deploy e-learning globally, there are obvious things to take into consideration. Here are a few that I have seen get overlooked, in no particular order of priority:

Make sure you know what the target technology environment is in each country and don't assume that just because there is a head-office corporate policy it actually happens that way in the real world. Find out about local bandwidth issues both within local intranets and for those who will use dial-ups out of the office (much of Latin America is on 14.4kbps; broadband is still rare even in much of Europe). Confirm the existence of sound cards or other media cards if you think you will need to use them. Confirm the operating systems, browsers and versions that are the minimum in the different target areas. Also establish what the local intranet policies are, especially where security, plug-ins, cookies, and firewalls are concerned. Make sure that your learning designs can accommodate any variances.

Also think about your e-learning as a 24-7 service, not a series of training products. Instructor or SME support in local languages is important, and so is technical support. You can't have a learner in Japan having to wait till 3a.m. to make a long distance phone call to the US to find out how to get his sound working. Train your local IT helpdesk to handle first-line support, or contract it out to a local 24-7 agency.

Time zones also play into the provision of real-time SME support. If your only SMEs are US-based, make sure that their schedules allow them to "be there" even occasionally for learners on the other side of the planet. We used to schedule synchronous sessions all around the clock, allowing learners to pick a slot that was convenient. and we usually logged the sessions and made them available in the course library as searchable databases, for those who just couldn't make it.

Take time to find out about local privacy policies. The way we handle the privacy of personal data in the US may be inappropriate or even illegal in other countries. For example, Germany has very strict labor laws that may forbid you from retaining certain performance records, or even from testing understanding. Sharing learner performance with managers may also be an issue, as is the question of anonymizing participation in synchronous or asynchronous group sessions. On the other hand, places like the UK have very little in the way of employee privacy protection.. so find out before you start programming.

Finally, while you will obviously try to localize language and vocabulary, also take into consideration local norms where things like grading and passing tests are concerned. In the US 70% seems to be what people assume is a pass. In other countries it's often 60 or 50. Using As, Bs, and Cs is a very American thing which makes no sense to many other nationalities.

Enough for now -- except to say that if you are doing some substantial multinational work you should look at the localizing services of some specialists in the e-learning field. In the DC area, welocalize.com has a good reputation. I have worked with an excellent company called Transware, who have offices all over the world and can do the localization, translation, and programming with people who are all native to the target language

Bandwidth and video - still an issue

I still have F100 clients who forbid streaming audio on their intranets, let alone video, and Flash is for them a definite no-no. So do not underestimate the bandwidth issues!

Video - and the other rich media - should only be used where there is a learning objective best served by it, and then only used sparingly. There is nothing worse for a learner than to have to sit through hours of gratuitous talking-head video. But if used to illustrate a point, behavior, or process, well-crafted bits of video can be very powerful.

The bandwidth demanded by your video will depend on so many factors, including the size of the window you play it in, the frame rate, the compression format you use and so on. Typically, for streaming video to a 400x200 window at 20 frames a second, you need about 360kbps of bandwidth per simultaneous user. Higher res or higher frame rate, and it can shoot up exponentially. Use a good compression algorithm like Flash MX04, and it can drop. Get your IT people involved early, define a bandwidth budget, and fit your video chunks into it.

Lessons from reality TV

As the latest season of reality TV's "Amazing Race" kicks off, I remember an episode last year that grabbed my attention and got me hooked on the show.

One couple was trying to get to a destination as fast as possible, and the man insisted on driving, leaving his wife to navigate -- something they both knew she was inept at doing. They lost he race, not because the navigator was unable to read a map, but because they failed to optimize their teamwork. Navigating required some specialized skill and was critical to success; driving was neither demanding nor critical. Why put the wrong team member on the critical task? If the man was imposing those decisions, and not managing their resources appropriately, he was to blame for their failure. If it happened out of habit, then challenging past behaviors would have been a productive thing to do -- though in the panic of a crisis, how often do we take the time needed to do this?

It is a leader's responsibility to set direction. He had assumed leadership, and was trying to lead by staying in control of the vehicle, even though he did not know where he was going. We see that a lot in business, in government, and we see it in training -- the headlong lunge for e-learning without pausing to think through strategy is a case in point.

When the driver finally realized that his navigator was not going to get them to their goal, instead of taking on that responsibility he did what so many business 'leaders' do -- he decided to follow his competitors in the hope that they knew what they were doing.

And, when it was all over, he let his navigator shoulder the blame for his failure.

I have to start watching more reality TV.

Generation gap foolishness

I have to agree with those who see the problems that occur when younger people manage older people as a management issue rather than a generation gap issue. It is perfectly natural for an older person to resent being managed by someone younger, and that has absolutely nothing to do with whether they are Generation X, Y, or E. It’s a question of mutual perception of value and credibility, not of generational values.

An older person can feel that their experience is undervalued by the company if a younger person gets the management role; the same person can feel undervalued by the manager if their experience and perspectives are not acknowledged or leveraged. Conversely, a younger person may feel threatened by an older person’s experience, may perceive that experience to be a barrier to positive change, or, worse, may not even know or care about the older person’s experience. The tension that exists between these people forms a barrier to clear communication, which exacerbates the problem. Each can end up thinking the other has attitude problems, and resentment builds.

It is not uncommon in organizations for a manager to have never seen an employee’s resume, and to know little about that person’s experience or perspectives. And it is very common for an employee to know nothing about their manager’s background. Mutual respect, the leveraging of the experience assets that each brings to a situation, and the creation of any kind of synergy, is unlikely where they are, effectively, strangers.

This can be avoided by good management practices and good interpersonal communication – the kind of basic management skills that anyone should have before being promoted into a people-management role. Knowing about Gen-X, Y etc. is likely to make the problem worse, not better: why try to get to know the specific value that an individual brings to your team when you can dismissively lump him/her into a superficial stereotype?

Understanding as a learning objective

The issue of whether "understanding" can be a viable learning objective has been raised recently on various online forums, and gets dismissed because achievement of understanding can't be measured or observed, and because behavior change is more appropriate a goal for training. I used to endorse this view, particularly back in the days when I was training people in MBO. But now I am not so sure.

First, in the academic education world, understanding IS a goal. It is fundamental to being able to analyze, form judgments, formulate opinions and beliefs, and develop intellectually. Few university courses, other than perhaps in 'the professions', aim to get students to DO anything of direct practical value. Yet renowned educational institutions the world over test understanding using rigorously designed means all the time. Try telling a professor of economics or metaphysics that you can't test for understanding. Teaching students how to understand within whatever appropriate context is, in my view, a noble and often achieved objective. Once the mental processes pump is primed, graduates are considered to be ready for the world, which was till recently a rather predictable place.

Second, that world is changing rapidly and growing ever more complex, way faster and more chaotically than say in the 50s. A core survival competence in business is the ability to rapidly "understand" new things, concepts, tools, processes, environments and so on. Without understanding there can be no meaningful behavior change. Without understanding there is alienation. So why is it considered inappropriate or unworthy to try to get employees to understand things? I have a growing conviction that the better employees understand the world they live in, the better able they are to adapt to it (or drive it) on their own, without formal training interventions.

I confess I am biased in this view. Three years ago I was approached to develop a series of e-learning courses for a telecommunications company. They knew that they were perceived by the market as old fashioned and slow, an analog-voice batch-systems operation in a world that was rapidly moving to a digital-data real-time focus. They determined that a primary albatross around their neck was their many-thousands strong employee base who simply did not understand the wired world of the Internet. The innovative thinkers in business strategy felt like they were running waist-deep in water. The drag of people who did not understand, did not care, or were passively resistant to e-business (from the mailroom to the boardroom) was a huge obstacle. And not having everyone through the length and breadth of the organization willing and able to see and react to e-business opportunities was a real threat to the company's evolution.

So we put together the courses to get every single employee to "understand" what was then called the new economy and its practical implications for them, for business, and for society. Though a lot of the training was experiential, many of the objectives were deliberately phrased in "understanding" terms, and much of what was conveyed was knowledge rather than skill or ability. But people came out of those courses grounded, confident, enthusiastic, and a lot more competent to talk about e-business issues and ideas. Today, that company is the most respected digital-data telecom in its field, and is looked to by others in its industry as setting the bar. Training was a significant part of that transformation, and developing "understanding" was a significant part of that training.

Understanding of anything lifts an employee above those without that understanding. Understanding can be taught, and adds significant leverage to any behavior-change efforts.

Or am I just not understanding?

What’s in a name?

What you name something tends to influence what it becomes.

Members of committees tend to think of their role as passive, perpetual, reactive; taskforce members think of themselves as actually having to initiate and achieve something specific with some sense of urgency or importance.

Problem-Solving Training

When I was running a computer games development company, every games publisher wanted something that was both radically new and that had been a proven success in the past. Hollywood is no exception. And these are among our most creative industries. They say that cloning puts evolution on hold, weakening the gene pool and making viruses (constantly evolving) inherently more dangerous -- in business, it's continuously innovative competitors you have to beware of.

The desire to repeat past success is one of the fundamental constraining factors in business. The assumption that you minimize risk by replicating what has worked in the past underlies much of management theory. We focus on minimizing investment risk rather than maximizing return. "Return" has uncertainty written all over it; "investment" is a little easier to control. So much of our strategic thinking is asset-based: we are good at X and we have Y resources, what return can we generate with them? It's not considered sound corporate practice to ask: we want to make $X million, what opportunities can we create? Startup entrepreneurs do it, because they have not yet become experts. And, because they have very little to lose, they focus on the returns rather than the investment risk.

I suspect that what passes for expert intuition is sub(un?)conscious pattern-recognition of the kind that allows "lesser" creatures to recognize lunch, avoid becoming lunch, and find their way when they migrate. The less experience you have, the more you feel a need to be analytical. The more experience you have in a particular field, the less you have to consciously make yourself think analytically, if you don't want to. You instinctively recognize patterns and react accordingly. But therein can lie the danger. If the world has changed, if there are factors at play today that were not there five years ago, a lazy reliance on instincts can cause you to miss opportunities for innovation, or, worse, just make mistakes.

That is why corporations that take problem-solving and decision-making seriously insist on having everybody trained in the use of analytical methodologies, and why they work at getting those methodologies into the culture of the business. If you have to work with the system, it's not that easy to get lazy and fall back on instinct.

Good e-Learning

Much of e-learning is simply content-pushing. Much of what passes for training in the classroom these days is also simply content pushing. I have often heard ILT vendors and in-company trainers lament the trend toward "fire-hose" training, getting ever-larger groups of people "trained" in ever-shorter courses. If content pushing suffices in a classroom, then why not use technology as a much more cost-effective time-efficient (and arguably more humane) substitute? It's not ideal, and of course you can achieve so much more with technology, but sometimes pragmatism comes into play. Why not just give them a book? Books are really slow and expensive to produce and nigh impossible to update in real time.

Be that as it may, I think the only criterion for deciding if a particular e-learning instance is "good" is whether it achieves its learning objectives better than any other approach would have, within time and within budget. When I say "learning objectives" I mean both corporate and individual learner objectives. I know that's not very useful, because the actual measure of "goodness" is after the fact and a little imprecise. But if you find models that worked, you can figure out why they worked, and apply those lessons where appropriate to future projects.

From my experience (balanced by some analysis!), these are some of the characteristics that go into creating goodness, particularly in a sales training context:

Accessibility (not slow and turgid, but pan and scan)
Visualization (connect theory with the task via realistic examples)
Collaboration and fostered informal learning (connect relevant learners with each other and SMEs to share concerns/experiences)
Immediacy (communicate product/policy changes in real time, ideally with a training component to the knowledge push)
Feedback loops (build in opportunities for learners to clarify issues and modify training content real-time based on problems or actual experience in the field)
There's more but I have gone on too long as it is.

None of this is expensive video-rich instructional-designed Rolls Royce learning product. And it may not fit the conventional concept of e-learning. But I'd encourage sales trainers to play with things like creating a new product blog (get product managers, marketing people, sales managers involved too), or a regional sales team blog for the sales people to build.

Check out the latest from Blogger.com -- anyone can get a secure image-rich blog up in minutes at no cost. Check out Spoke.com for a very neat social networking tool.

Problem-Solving Training

The cliché that you can't get to the future by looking in the rear-view mirror holds even more true in a world where change is no longer linear and predictable. If you don't know how to leverage experience, it can become baggage. Experience used to be an ever-appreciating asset; now you often need to depreciate it rather rapidly, or risk it having undue influence on your decisions.