An excerpt from Wireless, Inc. by Craig Settles c2002... a retro mlearning snippet

Below is an excerpt from Wireless, Inc. by Craig Settles c2002. A decade ago Craig was documenting what we were doing in the mLearning space. What is interesting to me is that while the technology has changed the principles, for the most part, have not.

Note the mention of the “iPaq” and things like “dynamic syndication server” – archaic right?

Also note the applications of mobile learning as appropriate for "sales" and other field services. Also as part of “continuing education" and mobile learners accessing the “collective experience of others.”

Some of the technology references and context may be a decade old, but the problem space remains today much as it was characterized a decade ago.

“Internal Education Tactics

Education of the troops is an ongoing process that happens at many levels. When a person begins employment, they have to learn about the organization’s policies, procedures, key people in the organizational chart, employee benefits, and so on. Then they have to learn procedures and other information specific to their respective departments. This may include learning how to use office equipment, plant machinery, etc.

Once employees complete their “entry-level” learning, they require ongoing education to keep abreast of new developments within their industry, market, and profession, as well as new projects and activities within their organizations. Also a part of continuing education is the type of learning that comes from tapping into the collective experience of others within the department or organization.                     

There is often general information that people only access occasionally, such as policies and procedures manuals, directions for completing travel and medical expense reimbursement forms, or lists of the retailers carrying your products. Since mobile workers don’t need to get to these materials all the time, it may be all right to just provide simple access to an intranet with the materials via their wireless devices.

For information and skills that are critical for employees to do their jobs, such as customer support procedures, or product assembly processes, spend time with your mobile workers to carefully plan both what content to make accessible and how to deliver it. If you provide extensive conventional training of mobile workers or inter-facility roamers before they are sent into the field, then your wireless content might include refresher materials that serve to reinforce what workers learn. But, if you hire people one day and put them on the road or into plant vehicles the next day, you might want to consider creating a full-featured training program that you can deliver wirelessly.                                                               

Of course, you may have decided when you were evaluating the fourth strategic dimension that you want to use wireless to reduce the cost of training. In that case, you should do a review of all of your training programs to determine the particular tactics you will use.

                                                                                   

David Koehn, AvantGo’s director of educational services, helps customers develop extensive wireless-enabled training courses. He also managed the development of a course that AvantGo staff use to train third-party developers who write applications using the company’s technology. (It’s always reassuring to know that vendors use their own technology).                                                                                                  

Koehn made several good recommendations that can contribute to the success of your efforts, whether you plan to create traditional training courses, or you are developing content to facilitate the distribution of policies, procedures, and general information.

Effective Design and Deployment Mean a Lot

Here are some of Koehn’s recommendations:  

·         Mobile learning is a blend of a product (a knowledge application) and a service (knowledge transfer). Because of this blend, m-learning needs conception, graphic and/or layout design, application development, and deployment planning. Whenever possible, use those with mobile expertise to manage your mobile learning implementation.

·         Use whatever you can from existing courses or materials. Don’t forget the m-learning mode is an extension of existing learning systems, whether online courses accessed on PCs or instructor-led classes, and not a separate pool of information. Use whatever you can from existing web materials such as page design, navigation, and search features, but modify these for the mobile user. The search feature is especially useful for reference materials like a Peterson Guide, though your material may not be that extensive.

·         Make your mobile courseware cross-platform so it works on all types of devices. Students may want courseware on their iPAQ one day and on their RIM BlackBerry the next.

·         Give a lot of thought to the design choices that you make. For example, decide if you are going to provide images for high-end mobile devices that you hope will work on low-end devices, or if you are going to use images that work well on low-end devices, but don’t use all of the capacity of the high-end device. Because the people receiving training may be using devices with different graphics capabilities, there will always be trade-offs on what looks good, what is needed, and what is practical. You have to find the right balance without sacrificing the main objective, which is to deliver effective training.

·         Stick to HTML and JavaScript for creating your courseware. This will make it easy to develop, easy to deploy, and easier all around for the people who have to use it. Your courseware should be interactive on mobile devices, even when the users aren’t wirelessly connected.

·         Publish the lessons from a dynamic syndication server rather than manually writing all of the pages. This is a publishing tool that allows you to create training modules in a SCORM-compliant (standardized) format and publish them to the Web in an automated way that does not require hours and hours of hand-coding.

·         As users input data into a particular course or interact with a trainer, be sure they can reconcile the data between their desktops and mobile devices using the devices’ sync feature, web surfing, or having it pushed from your servers. Students do not want the progress of training on the handheld version of their course to differ from that of their desktop course.

·         Make certain your m-learning course creates value. And, in turn, make certain you look to charge an employee’s department for an m-learning  product, even thought the application is for internal use. People will take these more seriously if there is a price tag attached, even if the money is primarily a paper transaction between departments.

·         Always be aware of the context in which people will use your courseware. Mobile learning is a “point of activity” application, meaning people likely will be doing whatever the course material is trying to teach them while they are taking the course. If users will be outside when learning or reviewing materials on horse breeding, it may not be a good idea to use fonts and font sizes that are hard to read on PDA screens in outdoor lighting. You also want to use a lot of diagrams because users won’t have a lot of time for reading when they’re working with a couple of frisky equines.

·         The situation and conditions under which people will use the courseware should also determine your hardware selection. Brad, a friend of mine who drives heavy construction equipment, is shopping for a PDA. He’s very conscious of the hardware design because the sand, dirt, and moisture in the areas where he works can ruin the internal components if the outer casing is flimsy or allows particles to slip in.

·         Don’t use fill-in-the-blank text fields. Use select lists and drop-down answer menus or buttons so a pen tap or a click can make the lesson interactive. Someone who’s brushing up on a couple of product features while sitting in the customer’s lobby before a repair visit doesn’t have a lot of time to etch long essays.

·         Your courseware should have occasional “e-mail for help” and “phone for help” features. This is especially valuable if people will be in locations where access to online help may not be available.

·         Create pages that require as little up and down scrolling as possible. Never expect students to scroll left and right.

When you finish developing your courseware, make sure that everyone who will use it gets hands-on experience guided by an instructor during the class or at some time before they go into the field. This is to ensure people use the application. If you just hand people a PDA and send them on their way, or let them download the application on their own, it’s likely that people won’t use the courseware.

Remember that m-learning, the same as in many other uses of mobile devices, often changes the behavior of the people using it in the organization and thus affects the behavior of the organization itself. If employees are learning on mobile devices, try to determine how this will impact instructors and managers, since the technology can increase the pace at which people learn, the type of questions that they ask, or even the way they perform their duties. These may all be positive changes, but to maximize the value of this new way of doing business you can’t have these people caught off guard.

When Does It Make Sense to Use m-Learning?

You can use these guidelines to develop mobile courseware that teach people to do all sorts of things including teaching people how to assemble, use, maintain, and/or repair equipment, depending on the person’s actual job. You may have employees hired to specifically do these things, but your mobile workers might be able to fix some things that break faster than it will take for support staff to arrive.                            

You may also need to train people how to use software applications, complete complex business operations that occur in the field (i.e., processing customer’s loan or insurance forms), or promote key features and benefits of your products. Mobile learning can be effective if your organization markets services or products from several companies and it’s hard to remember all the details about each one, or for your resellers and sales reps who also carry your competitors’ products.

                                                                         

Wireless training programs also make sense for mobile workers who have to keep track of a broad range of procedures and processes, such as doctors, lawyers, and financial services professionals. It’s not so much that you want these people to be learning on the job, but there are times when someone needs a quick refresher course for procedures they haven’t done in a while.                                                    

Some organizations have six-figure (or more) budgets to create “knowledge bases” on servers to store details on best practices, selling tactics for large accounts, documents that are designed for certain proposals, or negotiations. Your mobile workers may not need training programs for these, but they probably can benefit by having wireless access to this intellectual capital.                                                                             

As a closing thought, I recommend that you explore ways to use your training and other employee education tactics for your external audiences as well. The design and implementation expertise you learn from these applications for your employees can be applied to training for customers, possibly without a lot of modifications. Subsequently your investment will produce greater returns. And conversely, some of your tactics for educating external audiences will work for employees as well. In fact, self-help and professional development may produce more immediate financial returns among employees than customers and prospects."

--finis--

Sales Training and Social Learning

I read a great post at: http://sales20network.com/blog/?p=1024 

As I read the article on changing the name of "Sales Training" I liked the focus on change management. Shifting behavior from what it was to a new effective behavior.

Many training organizations provide oodles of “Sales Training.” And these learning organizations work hard to make this experience as unlike formal training as possible because Sales requires true knowledge transfer that converts into a change in behavior that results in more sales effectiveness i.e. more profit or revenue.

Because the problem of changing sales behavior is “real” and not theoretical. i.e. Will the sales increase or not — vs. — Can the learner solve for the square root of Pi.

Sales Training organizations focus on:

1. Adoption — can EVERYONE use and understand and achieve excellence?
2. True mastery — can everyone demonstrate to the greatest level possible real-world in-deal behavior that produces results
3. Guidance — can everyone at all times get access to the best coaching possible to achieve their numbers.

For this reason Social Learning has shot off among many training groups with a bullet.

Adoption:

The simplicity and ease-of-everything in Social Learning focuses on getting the Sales folk in, getting them going, and getting them engaged because the experience is fun and intrinsically valuable. For example I use Facebook because I intrinsically value my relationships. I feel (and "feel" is the key word) compelled to connect with my friends and family. In Sales groups that use Social Learning sales folks are compelled to participate because they intrisically “know” they will make more money by getting their questions answered by the “folksonomy” i.e. their group of rainmakers. They know the formal knowledge objects inside and out but it is all of the “connotative” i.e. emotional and deal-focused aspects of the selling they seek out in Social Learning for sales organizations.

True Mastery:

In Social Learning for Sales there is no theory. There is data and technique that has proven success–this means for every aspect of a formal sales training, the sales folks can provide real-world examples of how the deals reacted to the behaviors they were asked to display.

This means absolute validation via the sales folk of what is and is not working. This means gold star sales folk can accelerate their game to new levels from just “great” to truly “excellent.” Their fine tuning from the nuance provided by the community can double their numbers. This means the average sales folk have access to the information and cultural know-how to become top performers.

Most sales orgs struggle because new sales hires take too long to “get” all of the 360 degree aspects of how to make deals happen. With Social Learning that time is radically compressed.

Guidance:

The conversational nature of Social Learning wraps the formal knowledge in the discussions of the rainmakers who point out what aspects of the training actually = more deals. Rainmakers can show learners how to frame and pitch what was learned. Rainmakers describe how to overcome obstacles and objections that an “objection handling” document can’t.

We did an informal poll at http://sabasociallearning.com and found that the overwhelming data suggested companies see onboarding occur more quickly when some form of mentoring is involved.

Whether formally assigning a local salesperson to nurture a new sales hire,
-or-
whether assigning a virtual coach who coaches many,
-or-
whether informally accessing knowhow of rainmakers on an as needed basis:
social learning accelerates sales folks in ways previously only dreamed.

Sales training (or whatever it is best called) and social learning are a match made in sales management heaven! 

Debunking the Cliché: The Marketing Makes the Product

"The raven chides blackness." Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare

This post is a quick post on debunking the cliché that the marketing makes the product. I'll also address the cliché that the critic is the source of truth. 

Oddly enough this is a paradox. A fun one to consider, but a paradox nonetheless.

Software companies have a new challenge, but it is the same challenge as any business still adopting old school thinking. 

The old school marketer believes that a message ABOUT a product experience makes the difference.

All marketers have to face that products are the marketing. Any product that can't deliver on the needs of the user will likely fail. 

Conversely, in the social age, products that deliver on the needs of their user will likely succeed. 

The age when a marketer or a critic can stamp a product, a movie, a restaurant a failure (or "not up to snuff") is gone. The masses decide...

The zeitgeist is that the adopters decide--not the marketer, nor the expert. News spreads fast, and unfounded criticism i.e. contempt before examination surfaces quickly. 

In regards to critics, many examples are in the restaurant industry where a food critic (after one meal and sometimes without one) grinds a personal axe to express dislike for a restaurant. The restaurant's "fans" create such backlash the restaurant's business shoots through the roof AND the critic's reputation as a capable food critic is permanently lost.

I do feel bad that the paid local food critic role has largely gone away. The convention was quaint. Yelp has proven that what the masses and what one's friends think of the food is WAY more important than what the pundits say.

Unmeasured criticism expressed without a full data set (nor any direct experience) doesn't work anymore. Everything eventually gets washed through the filter of the crowd. The crowd adopts the product, the crowd assesses the product, the crowd recommends or doesn't recommend the product.

The product is the marketing. 

The raven chides blackness... and the proof is in the pudding.

Homo Ludens: Games and Authentic Play

Back in the olden days when I was in college, a professor of mine asked me to read Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens.


For those who have known me throughout my life as academic, teacher, writer, entrepreneur, technologist, strategist--you have seen me surface and re-surface this text.


I used Home Ludens  in multiple college papers, my master's thesis, the first post of the now defunct Great American Pinup team blog, as a frame for team building...it's power over me for the last 20 or so years has not diminished.


"Let my playing be my learning, and my learning be my playing." has become a core tenet of my thinking.


Currently I am re-using the tenets in how I frame product strategy. 


The gamification of the Web for me is a symptom of this core human need to be "lost in it." This means we aspire to be engrossed, engaged, freed to feel free with the activity of the moment.


Oddly enough games and their rules provide microcosms where the feeling of total immersion, a sense of total freedom, a sense of transformation unbounded by fear, can be possible.


Sometimes games create but a flash of this feeling. But that flash may be rich enough to engage and re-engage its players. The lottery, tic-tac-toe, Go, rewards programs for credit cards, progress bars, all are game elements that displace the reality of the task with a game that compels me to participate. 


Teachers have long sought games that reinforce their learning objectives. This is how teachers have created successful students at many levels. To get the student "playing" is to get them learning.


So why does this matter? The gamification of the Web is happening...and no where is this more important than in learning.


For the Kauffman Foundation I presented with Eric Ries to a group of learning start-ups. One myth I asked them to dispel, that was ripe for opportunity, is that games and video games in particular have negative learning impact. This is false, tremendous learning can be achieved through games, gaming, and video games in particular.


Challenges, points, badges, connections, Farmville, Sims, Kongregate, Scvngr, Gamesville, how it will all manifest, who knows? 


The game-changing play for Learning (and the Web at large) will be the embrace of games and gaming as a wave of engagement that will re-invigorate the Web.

5 Ways the iPad Changes the Learning Marketplace

The iPad will accelerate many changes in the learning space. I think there are specific capabilities on the iPad that will dramatically impact the production of learning applications and learning content going forward.

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1. "Occasionally connected computing" comes of age making any learning environment viable for computer use whether bandwidth is huge, weak, or non-existent.

The iPad fulfills on the promise of the uber-rich client that draws what it needs from the Web and renders it in the most optimal way for the user.

The sci-fi images of the user moving their hands side-to-side through holograms to manipulate a user interface is not far off.

2.  Price. User's receive the richest available interface at the same price level as a smart phone.

The beef with tablets and handhelds and phones has always been the nature of their usable interface. Built to be small. Modeled after a keyboard/mouse interface.

The rocket science here is that the pricepoint is right AND the interface provides the ultimate user experience (not the least appealing experience). The expectation that the laptop/desktop experience is the ideal or preferred experience is gone!

3. Trust of the experience from Enterprise users.

The iPad is inheriting the best of the iPhone experience and it is seeing a universal groundswell in demand from the Enterprise user.

Large enterprise organizations, e.g. entire sales forces, are demanding the experience because it not only works as a hi-fi experience for training themselves but training (or demoing to) a customer by just holding up the iPad has real impact.

Who expected that the Enterprise would so rabidly (correct spelling) adopt the device?

4. Content and apps catalogs assumed as a default behavior of coursework.

iTunes tamed music and the iPad will tame coursework. The music labels used to control all the production and distribution of music.

With digitization, followed by stores like iTunes, the democratization of music production and consumption shifted radically.

Edu content will feel the same shift. Major providers of content will feel the shift of production of content into the hands of the distributed marketplace. Expect the aggregation of content from major providers and others into agnostic catalogs. Much of the content will be authored by indie providers. Much of the content will be consumed in short snippets (a single song rather than a entire album).

Expect "Kayak" for "Coursework" to make the iPad an even more powerful learning tool.

5. Collaboration as an experience will be assumed.

Like an OS, the features that accelerate collaboration will become assumed as part of the learning experience.

a. Location: I will understand who and what is nearby that is relevant to my learning and interests.
b. Opinion: I will see what others think of what I am learning. I will see what they think, how they classify my learning, and how they advise me and others to proceed. I will trust these people because either I know them or others I trust have ranked them as ideal sources.
c. Presence: I will be able to connect in real time with people interested in or knowledgeable about the same things I am interested in. Live voice, video, chat, and sharing will become instantaneous and easy in all of my learning on the iPad.

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Undoubtedly the iPad is cool. What is really exciting is that the learning marketplace, including the corporate learning marketplace, appears to have adopted the iPad in a way that is unique and lends itself to becoming the tool of choice for transforming the learning space.

10 myths 10 Minutes 10 tweets for Opening Night of #SWSF Learning

This presentation was delivered at Startup Weekend San Francisco #SWSF just after Eric Ries's. No talk track or audio on this Slideshare. But do ask if you want to hear what I said.

10 myths 10 Minutes 10 tweets

View more presentations from dkoehn68.

Ignite Your People Knowhow: Learning Anywhere, Everywhere

http://bit.ly/bDpJgL

Tuesday, 24 August 2010, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM (GMT -04:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)

As your organization seeks new ways to outperform the status quo, ensure you're harnessing and multiplying the knowhow and performance of your people. Traditional work styles have given way to today's networked way of working, where the norm is highly “connected” people operating in a fluid environment and fast changing pace. Today's new work style means that learning needs to happen as part of work rather than as a separate, formal event. This means enabling learning where people work, where they travel, outside of work, connected, disconnected, practically anywhere and everywhere. Now more than ever, your organization needs to embrace all the ways in which you can give people and teams the knowhow necessary to effectively compete and succeed.

Register for this web seminar on Igniting People Knowhow to explore:

• How learning processes have evolved to incorporate formal, informal and social aspects

• How new approaches in learning delivery can transform the user experience

• How your corporate portal can become a one-stop solution for critical learning and process support

• How to assemble the experience of your choice with embeddable business processes

• How to deliver learning to individuals across the globe in offline and mobile situations

• How your learning initiatives can directly impact your company's revenue, profits and business agility

Join David Koehn, head of Saba's Learning Strategy group, and learn how organizations of all sizes are redefining the learning experience to accommodate the new way of working, thereby multiplying the productivity and knowhow of their people and improving their business agility.

Register here: http://bit.ly/bDpJgL