Basics: Default values in forms

A neat little article discussing how default values should be used. It's an "of course" that is good to look at periodically.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/defaults.html

Stories to build experience

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,68899,00.html

Beautiful use of stories and technology to capture implicit knowledge.

KM in context

http://www.kmworld.com/publications/magazine/index.cfm?action=readarticle&article_id=2224&publication_id=142

How BBC does KM. This looks like the "right" way to me.

Training Sales People

Ok. This is actually a piece about building a relationship between marketing and sales. Eerily, it summarizes many of the strategies my department has been brainstorming over the last several months.

Training Sales People

10-point checklist for writing copy

A 10-point checklist for writing copy. Which designers never do, right? Still, it offers some thinking points for development.

Who writes content?

In a conversation with Dr. Hansen, an extraordinary Instructional Design professor, she asked me who wrote content for my modules.

I responded that I did. She looked a little concerned as she stated that, when she worked at Arthur Anderson, she had her SMEs write the content, after they agreed on objectives. She would work with the material, but never sat down with a blank piece of paper.

All of the designers I know sit down with volumes of material, and select and assemble the pieces of information needed for the module with SME help. Thus, we do a lot more content development than she was describing.

There are some marked difference between her SME set-up and the ones that I've work with. Her SMEs were dedicated to her for a number of month. Content development was their job. Her SMEs were also, I think, better able to write content. I absolutely don't look down on the salespeople that I work with, but they are not very skilled at setting words to paper.

Product people and engineers, on the other hand, are able to create an initial draft of content. That, then, raises the issue that they'll try to add the history of the world and expect it all to be taught the way it is written. This will lead to a game of "Push-back" as I try to trim the material down to the objectives.

You can see that I'm still thinking through this. But it does raise the both raise the question of what I should be focusing on, and gives me some small amount of authority to question the expectation that I am a content developer.

Estimation

A friend of mine forwarded an email chain from the Instructional Technology List Server at the University of Georgia(ITFORUM@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU). I will unabashedly plagerize the comments because they both hit a sore nerve and suggest a vision of education's future direction, which I support.

Mark Peterson described a conversation where he discussed the way technology changes what kids need to learn. For instance, today's kids are adept at using calculators (which are ubiquitous), but are not very good at doing math in their heads. He questions whether mental mathmatics is still relevant and, if not, what other things to computers/technology make irrelevant.

Alfredo responds, stating that, while he doesn't feel that math should be taught just because it's hard, he still doesn't think that complete dependence on a machine is the answer. He asks "What if you run out of batteries? What if I press a wrong button and am off by an order of magnitude? How would I tell?"

He suggests that there are some basic skills: multiplying two numbers smaller than 10 and being able to estimate that are essential. He goes on to state that a basic knowledge of math is needed to operate a calculator. For example, operator precedence and the distributive law.

His first calculator used "reverse Polish notation," which did operations without parenthese, but required careful adherence to entry order and operators, and also forced you to learn about "stacks," "pushing," and "popping." (Whatever they are - it sounds drug related to me, which makes sense. Math makes me want to use drugs too.) He suggests this as a way to encourage kids to learn basic math rules. He also suggest slide rules as a way to learn powers of ten.

Clark Quinn adds the following thought:

"Jim Levin, with the advent of calculators almost 30 years ago, argued that the skill going forward would not be mathematics, but estimation (he's been ahead of his time in many ways). You don't want to trust a calculator if you don't know the right order of magnitude.

We invent tools to augment our thinking and take burdens off of us. So we don't teach shorthand anymore in school. I don't think the average person needs to learn to do long division by hand. You don't use it anymore."

You may ask, "What does this have to do with androgogy, the focus of your life's work?" My answer is that it's painfully relevant. I'm a whiz at Excel, but can never make my sums right. I'm an adult with the inability to get Microsoft Money to balance my bank account. Why? Because I can't estimate or remember the order of operations.

9/10's of my problem is my own fault. As a snotty 10-year old, I sneered at those who relied on memorization and saw no reason to learn something that a calculator could do even better. Unfortunately, Alfredo is right about the math abilities required to use a calculator. Nonetheless, even as snotty as I was, I did have a point (though nobody could have forseen Excel or Money back in the mid-'80s.) Wouldn't it have been more relevant to teach me how to use a calculator, how to estimate and the order of operations? After all, I refused to learn to spell too. With the instant feedback of spellcheck, I've developed into a strong speller. To broaden the analogy, there are basic skills that you need in order to make spellcheck work. You need to be able to guess a substantial number of the phonemes and you must be able to differentiate between closely pronounced and spelled words (accept and except). Luckily, I learned these skills because my mom forced me to look up everything in the dictionary.

To take it one step further, with an easily accessible Internet, people are learning to remember tags: web pages (Wikipedia, dictionary.com, switchboard.com, thiagi.com) or keywords ("nutritional information: Snickers", "mathematics operator precedence", "treating poison ivy") than actual bits of information. Which is all to the good: I'm discovering that everything that I think I know, having heard it somewhere, is wrong. So, even the stuff I did bother to memorize is useless. Our performance development skills must adapt to these new realities.

Knowledge Management

Tom Godfrey writes an introspective Knowledge management blog that has a lot of great tidbits. He has some interesting thoughts about Wikis as KM tools, and is experimenting with one on an intranet site.

Top vs. Bottom

The HRD profession is becoming aware of the power of demonstrating hard and soft dollar impacts on business. "Show the ROI," we hear. "Demonstrate your effect on the Bottom Line." We know that we have to be business partners with the C-level executives responsible for approving our budgets.

The problem is that, for many of us, the concept of a "bottom line" is little more than a corporate buzzword. We might generally understand that the bottom line has something to do with profitability and have no idea if there is such a thing as a top line. This situation is unfortunate because being able to describe and prove a top line impact can be much more powerful and exciting.

To show how this works, let's first discuss the definitions of bottom and top lines. The bottom line refers to the cost of producing a unit. When you reduce the bottom line, you reduce this cost: it saves money. An increased top line is talking about increased sales dollars or volume. The impact makes money.

Training always has an impact on the bottom line. We make employees more productive, more accurate and help retention. More units per employee per hour means fewer salary dollars invested in each unit. More accurate employees mean less waste. Increased retention mean fewer recruiting and training dollars. If you add up all these savings and compare them with the amount of money spent on the training, you are showing ROI.

A top line impact comes from training salespeople or customers. More productive salespeople sell more. More accurate salespeople lose fewer customers and increase the amount sold to each customer. More productive, happy customers buy more products from you. In these examples, training makes money.

This is especially important since psychology shows that people are more accepting of risk then anticipating gain than when avoiding loss. In other words, $100 feels more productive when invested in stocks than when spent on insurance. Use this: think about whether you, in your HRD role, might have a legitimate top line effect. Your CFO would stand up, applaud and throw money at you, if you could say, and prove, "This cutting-edge training program could mean two million dollars in additional sales."

Intranet Needs Analysis

I haven't had time to read this, but it looks very interesting.

CNC Butterfly Festival

In July, I took part in the Chattahoochee Nature Center's Butterfly Festival. It sounded like a great way of spending a Saturday: outside, taking part in a community activity and, best of all, watching the butterfly release.

Imagine an eruption of Monarch butterflies pouring from a large wooden box. It's something you want to see for yourself.

The Chattahoochee Nature Center (CNC) does this every year to educate children about the Monarch lifecycle. They used something called the "Migration Game" to make the educational aspect fun. Along a trail through the woods, stations were set up where children learned about one stage of the Monarch lifecycle. At each stage, there were live examples of Monarchs (eggs, caterpillars, chrysali and adults) and an experiential activity where the child could pretend to be the insect.

When I signed up, I was emailed material about the butterflies including some basic FAQs and other information about monarch butterflies. Of course, I didn't have much time to do more than quickly review the information, despite my good intentions. It would have helped to have known my assigned station beforehand. That way I could have memorized the three or five FAQs related to that station rather than trying to review the entire sheet. It turned out that I chose my station (chrysali) and will choose the same one next year, so I can be effective.

My task was to engage the kids and try to elicit opinions and thoughts. My strategy for this was to develop a two-second speech and associated questions for different age levels. I'd ask the kids what was happening inside the chrysalis. If they knew, I'd have them tell me. If not, I'd try to explain it to them. Then I'd ask them what they thought was prettier: the chrysalis or the butterfly. (That was a tough question. Monarch chrysali are amazingly beautiful: Jade colored with delicate dots of gold and black. They look more like jewelry than insects.) If they were a little older, I'd ask how, if they were a scientist, could they tell what was happening in there. Nobody could come up with a suggestion, so I'll need to revise it for next year.