June 2008 – Page 6 – Silence and Voice

ASTD Learning Lab Wikis

While some (including yours truly) have been speaking about the ASTD convention and the lack of Web 2.0 technologies used there and by the organization (membership) itself, I am reminded that ASTD did establish a number of wikis to be used during their Learning Labs that were conducted on Monday and Tuesday at the conference.

I attended one of these, the one for University Instructors and Professors (hey, I adjunct at NYU, don’t I?). Of the three people who showed up for the face-to-face session, nobody changed anything on the wiki. Ironically, in bright red text, the instructions on each page of the wiki stated

Please leave existing text on pages intact.

Doesn’t that contradict what wikis are all about, namely to foster interactive content creation and sharing? Take a look at the wikis, most of which do not have any changes or edits or anything done to them. I wonder if this is because people did not know what to do with these? Did not know they were there? Followed the directions quite literally? Did not care?

I am not sure, but am wondering if these should not be revisited and used TO PREPARE for next year’s convention? I think if ASTD did more to foster community among convention attendees going into the event, then that may help people strengthen them during and continue well after the event.

I am definitely considering some ideas to submit for next year. Hmmmmm.

Jeffrey’s Twitter Updates for 2008-06-18

@rlk300 So early? Just getting started! #
@arjunsingh I think we have some FEMA trailors we can send up. It seems we no longer want to use them for our own people in need . . . #
Better go finish the dishes. I have a project plan I need to tweak for an early morning meeting. #
Almost to work. Early meetings today. #
Just walked by somebody on the street wearing a blue face mask. A bit extreme. #
The second of the five meetings today just ended. The first two were the major ones. #
@injenuity Thank you. I just replied! #
@maniactive Quite clever this early in the day. #
@lynne_gabriel Welcome to Twitter. Keep an eye on that @skydaddy for us, ok? #
@macboyx Good for you. To think, cut out the coffee and blogging and social media time? #
@josien Where is this happening? It sounds interesting. #
@nattynato Thank you for the feedback. Let’s hope others found the wiki experience useful. #
@daveseah Break down those barriers, Dave! #
@gminks Just as unnaturally high as the oil company profits. If there is such a shortage, why are they making more than ever? #
Has anybody used NewsGator Go! for Mobile RSS reading? http://tinyurl.com/3bflgb #
@injenuity and right back at you. #
@injenuity Not sure which is more interesting — commenting back and forth there or here? #
@maniactive It was more common among Japanese tourists after 9/11, but the president has not scared us by raising the terror level . . . #
@skydaddy How does the line go, something like “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” #
Meeting #3 down. 2 to go. #
Oh right, I have a faculty meeting after work as well. Joy. #
At a faculty meeting for one of the grad programs in which I teach. #
There loss. I am already hot. #
Their loss. I am already hot. #
The faculty meeting ended up being quite good. Lots of good news and great ideas. #

LinkedIn Funding in Today’s NYTimes

There is an interesting article in today’s New York Times about LinkedIn, which seems to be making enough money to get $53 million in funding. They seem to have some plans for expanding professional services to firms, rather than following the Facebook / MySpace entertainment and purely social networks.

Having been convinced recently to spend more time using LinkedIn, I cannot say I have been able to leverage it to achieve anything yet. Can anybody share a success they have had due to using LinkedIn, so I can get some ideas how to maximize it?

Technorati Tags: LinkedIn

Jeffrey’s Twitter Updates for 2008-06-17

@abalone Hope you will have an engaging experience. #
@pinoyboy Sounds like food issues to me. A friend commented how often I Tweet about food. Uh oh . . . #
@skydaddy BTW, interesting new avatar. It looks like a pic from Apocalypse Now. #
@skydaddy Congrats on the Help Desk tickets. Can I send you a few? #
@gminks Can’t be! But then again, Thriller was the first piece of music I ever bought. #
@coyenator Do a SWOT analysis. #
@chrismillet like Bugs? #
@skydaddy Great. Will you use a public wiki for it? #
Went to the dentist for a cleaning and exam. I need 2 small fillings due to gum recession. At least nothing major! #
One more meeting for today. #
What a long day. Off to class. #

Learning 2.0 = ROI?

It seems the discussion that has been going on (cf. Gina, among others), on where Learning 2.0 is (and I recently posted about this with some very inciteful comments). Her last post, and my response to Jim Groom on his reaction to my thoughts has me going in a new direction.

With talk about Web 2.0 and Learning 2.0 and Academic vs (&?) Corporate use of individual and engaging learning applications, I am now thinking about the cost issues and ROI.

Now, take a deep breadth — I am not a proponent of measuring ROI, especially with applications that are difficult to even explain to the uninitiated newbies. But, if I wanted to (read between the lines — perhaps my organization won’t do anything without an ROI study), what could I do? It is already enough of a challenge to demonstrate how any expenditure can provide an ROI, especially after Corporate America (to limit my sweeping statement a bit) lost its shirt in the rush to embrace all things eLearning a few years back. With those calculations out the window as really involved and interactive elearning takes much longer to develop (and thus determine its ROI), as per Bryan Chapman whose blog post lists these amounts (which I am reproducing from his ASTD 2008 presentation handout, which he claimed during his session was a bit outdated):

34:1 Instructor-Led Training (ILT), including design, lesson plans, handouts, PowerPoint slides, etc.

33:1 PowerPoint to E-Learning Conversion. Not sure why it takes less time then creating ILT, but that’s what we discovered when surveying 200 companies about this practice

220:1 Standard e-learning which includes presentation, audio, some video, test questions, and 20% interactivity

345:1 Time it takes for online learning publishers to design, create, test and package 3rd party courseware

750:1 Simulations from scratch. Creating highly interactive content

then what do we do?

If we have enough trouble determining pure ROI (meaning a financial return, not the unmeasurable peace of mind knowing the new orientees get the approved HIPAA training and nothing else), then how on earth can we measure successful implementation of Learning 2.0?

Now, off to go and Tweet about this now.