This gives new meaning to the term on-the-job training

http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/02/19/nchina19.xml

An Oxford engineering student bluffed his way through a series of global economics lectures in Beijing after being mistaken for a New York University professor with the same name.

The 23-year-old student used a basic textbook as lecture notes to deliver two days of lectures. (He was supposed to lecture for three days but "legged it" after running out of textbook chapters.) He says, "I ad libbed a bit and really got into the subject. I was learning as much as my audience."

The NYU professor took this all in stride, saying "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" and that there was no harm done.

I'd be interested in hearing some discussion on this article.

Have you ever bluffed your way through delivering a training session when you didn't feel you had adequate knowledge on the subject? Were you successful, or were you found out?

What would you have done in this student's situation? Would you have explained up front that you didn't know anything about the topic? Would you have said yes and then not shown up? Would you have done what he did and try to bluff your way through it?

A formula for making work fun

What is the key to fun at work? "Deep fun" maven Bernie DeKoven says it's maintaining the balance between a person's ability and the challenge. His article offers charts, graphics, and more explanations that are actually kind of, well, fun to read.

DeKoven offers a whole list of articles on fun in the workplace as well as a wide range of links. Thanks to elearningpost for pointing out this article.

Please excuse the double posting

Those of you checking in on this blog through a reader program may get a posting today that was a duplicate of one from the beginning of February. ("It's not over until...") I was having some technical difficulties today and needed to delete and repost that one. Just ignore it. (However, if you've tried to access the "Ten Technologies That Refuse to Die" MIT Technology Review article recently, you'll have discovered as I did that you now need to be a subscriber to read it. I found another place online where you can access the article and changed the link, so try it again and let me know if it doesn't work. Thanks!)

In search of one good man or woman in Antarctica (prize offered!)

Do you know someone working or stationed in Antarctica? Then you could be a big winner. I'm looking for one good man or woman who would find the E-Learning Glossary useful.

Why? The glossary is being used by trainers, researchers, consultants, students, and others on six out of seven continents. I want to make that seven.

I will give a lovely prize to anyone who can point me to someone.

Thanks!

Feel-good quote of the day

"In organizations, real power and energy is generated through
relationships. The patterns of relationships and the capacities to form
them are more important than tasks, functions, roles, and positions."
-- Margaret Wheatley

Thanks to HeartMath's HeartQuotes for this one.

New! Work psychology discussion groups

WorkPsych Associates is offering two new email discussion groups (aka listservs), described below. Both are free; to register, go to http://www.workpsychcorp.com/listserv.tpl. Thanks to Jeff Kahn, CEO of WorkPsych, for letting me know about these.

Executive Emotion [EE]:
Topic Samples: Executive assessment, training, development, education, coaching, treatment, transitions and dysfunction: from the perspectives of management, leadership, performance, emotional intelligence, personal emotion, and organizational behavior.

Members: management, HR, executive development, organizational development, training, occupational health, occupational mental health, ombudsmen, employment law.

Mental Health and Productivity in the Workplace [MHPW]:
Topic Samples: quality mental health care, benefits, cost-effectiveness, workplace change & crises, violence, disability, management & HR approaches to anxiety, depression, personality, substance abuse.

Members: management, HR, executive development, organizational development, training, occupational health, occupational mental health, ombudsmen, mental health benefits, disability managers and consultants, employment & labor law.

Trend-spotting

I won't go into too much detail about TechKnowledge. Jay Cross has covered his three days there and what he came away with on his blog. Check that out if you're interested in more nitty-gritty. (And thanks for the mention, Jay. It was nice to put the face to the name with you and others.)

But I wanted to give you all a big-picture view from where I sit. This is how I would characterize what I learned: I think there's a big push to get back to basics and a big push forward into uncharted territory, both happening simultaneously.

Let me explain. I heard a lot about ROI, making the business case for e-learning, demonstrating the value of training to business execs. The speakers I heard were in agreement: We're past the point of technology for technology's sake. Each whiz-bang gadget must prove its worth in dollars and cents or other tangible impact on the business--just as training departments must these days.

In the expo, I didn't see any great innovation. I saw suppliers being cautious--making improvements on product ideas that have existed for a while. Nothing stood out to me and made me say "Wow!" The booth that drew the most traffic offered a live broadcast/recording of a Web seminar. The main innovation I saw there was the ability to change the backgrounds behind the instructor. You could look like you were in Egypt, or a forest, for example.

At the same time as this return to basics, there is a small but noticeable push to the future. It's a cautious push, one that's wiser than in the earlier heady days of technology. But mobile learning, simulations, collaborative learning, electronic performance support, and other technologies we've been hearing about for a while are slowly improving in quality and increasing in use. They're finally coming into their own.

In the meantime, we're looking ahead to see what's coming down the pike next. I propose to you that what's next will have a lot to do with social software and workflow tools. (See previous blog entry.)

Ellen Wagner from Macromedia summed up the dichotomy of standing on solid ground while looking ahead to the future in a panel discussion on The Future of Learning. We need to conduct a balancing act, she said. That means being ready for the "next big thing" without forgetting what needs to be done today.

Quick hits

The TechKnowledge conference has been a whirlwind as I've attended sessions, chatted with presenters and attendees, listened and learned, and shared my knowledge.

I will offer more analysis in the next couple of days, but in the meantime here are some quick hits of hot topics at the conference this year.

1) social software and e-learning. ASTD COO/CIO Tony Bingham talked about social software tools in his opening address, as did keynote speaker and Newsweek.com editor Michael Rogers. These tools are currently very hot among the younger generations; look for their influence to begin spreading into workplace learning. I just wrote two articles on this topic in Learning Circuits. Go to We Learning Part I and Part II .

2) informal learning. This topic was mentioned in many of the sessions I attended. By some estimates, up to 80 percent of learning in a company takes place informally. Online learning communities, expert management software, workflow tools, and other innovations attempt to standardize and take advantage of the informal learning that's already happening in organizations.

3) context. You may have heard "content is king." Well, the cry at TechKnowledge this year is that context is critical. Without context, we're just throwing information at learners. With context, they're able to understand what that information means to them and to their jobs, and to effectively translate the information into knowledge and, we hope, action. Technology, said Harvey Singh of Nanowave, will link context with content.

I'll leave you for now with a quote from Singh. "The best way to predict the future," he said, "is to invent it."

Long-distance blogging

I'm in California now, en route to ASTD's TechKnowledge conference in Anaheim. I'll try to hop on here at least once over the three day conference to offer you a backstage view.

If you're coming to TechKnowledge, look for me. I'll be wearing an ASTD staff name badge and attending sessions. Feel free to come say hi. Hope to see you!

It's not over until... (old-school technologies and traditional training)

This article from MIT's Technology Review, "Ten Technologies That Refuse to Die," proves an important point. The article illustrates how new and old technologies can co-exist peacefully; they don't require an either-or choice.

Analog watches, broadcast radio, fax machines, and other technologies that have more modern equivalents still exist--not just in the homes or offices of Luddites, but as thriving alternatives for the very technologies that were supposed to replace them.

See a parallel in the world of learning?

Yes, the death of good old classroom training has been greatly exaggerated. When e-learning started to proliferate, many people believed it would completely replace face-to-face training. Well, just a few years later we look around and realize that classroom training is alive and well. Blended learning is the new buzzword--the key for successful learning projects is in finding the right mix of technology and tradition for learners' needs.

(We predict a similar process with the next wave--workflow tools. As more companies begin to explore those technologies, face-to-face training and e-learning will continue to be part of a trainer's toolbox.)

As the Ten Technologies article states, "All have survived, and some have thrived, in their supposed obsolescence, not as cult artifacts...but because they fill real needs that their more sophisticated successors don't."

Two scary things at work: psychopaths and Big Brother

1) How many people work in your company? If there are 100 employees, you can count on having one psychopath. For 200, two psychopaths, and so on. So says a study reported on by Washington Post columnist Richard Morin.

Morin explains that New Economy companies with lax rules attract more psychpaths than old-style, bureaucratic ones and points out some characteristics to be on the watch for.

(Thanks to T+D Extra for pointing out this item. To subscribe to the free e-newsletter, go to http://www.astd.org/ASTD/publications/td_magazine/tdextra.html.)

2) According to an article in Wired News, your computer may soon be doing more than letting you write presentations, check email, and play Solitaire. Technology is being developed that enables computers, hooked up to people's bodies, to provide real-time information on their emotional and physical states. And not just to the user--to anyone an organization deems the information relevant to.

One of the technology's developers says such systems would make us "more fully human." I'm not so sure: It sounds like Big Brother to me if it's used in the daily operations of corporations. But one main use for this type of information, the Wired article says, would be in the military where lives can depend on someone else's emotional and physical state. I can see the application there, perhaps.

Also, an efficiency coach interviewed by Wired envisioned such technology being used by individuals themselves to work as biofeedback. There's something like that already--I wrote about it in a February 2002 feature article ("Put Your HeartMath Into It"). HeartMath's Freeze-Framer software lets users monitor and modify their heart rhythms for better business performance.

What about you, dear readers? Can you see a (non-Big Brother use) use for this type of technology at your organization? What applications do you see for training?

Taking time for training

That training I took last week really set me back. Two days of work missed and I'm scrambling to get things done. Is this an argument for e-learning? That my time might've been better spent doing the training online, where I might've been able to test out of certain modules in which my skills were up-to-snuff and take only the modules that I needed, shortening my time away from work? Maybe. But, still, there is something to be said for getting away from the office so that your entire attention is focused on what you're learning, right?

Oh wait, my entire attention wasn't focused. I spent my breaks checking email back at work, wishing that I had more time to get something more productive than just email done. The training came at the worst possible time, so my stress level was high. I probably wasn't absorbing the information as well as I could've.

So this is an argument for e-learning, which I could've scheduled for myself (versus being tied into dates scheduled way in advance when I couldn't have predicted my workload) and that I could've shrunk down by pre-testing to just the information I needed. Perhaps with those adjustments I would've been more relaxed, better able to concentrate and focus, and would've retained more knowledge.

But what about the social interaction? The group work we did, critiquing each other's writing? Here's the argument for synchronous e-learning. For virtual classrooms, for live chat, for shared whiteboards.

But I'm not advocating blindly turning every training course into e-learning. There are certain skills that need to be learned in a classroom. Very technical or hands-on ones, for instance. Some soft skills that would be hard to teach without being face-to-face. I'm sure you can think of examples.

It's important for training managers to design training on a case-by-case basis and find the format that works best for the subject matter and learners. In my case, a shortened synchronous course scheduled at regular intervals, so I could pick the date and time that worked best for me on short notice.

After allowing people to test out of basic information, the course could be set at an advanced level. A second synchronous course could be taught on the basics. Is my wish list extravagent? Maybe for small organizations, but not for big companies that offer lots of training. These adjustments sure would've saved my sanity the last couple of weeks. (Although, I have to admit an office move also contributed to my crunched time and there's nothing training could've done about that!)

Testing, Testing, 123

By popular request, we now have an RSS feed for this blog (as well as an Atom feed). Please let me know if this doesn't work and I'll try to sort it out.

Thanks!

Work-life balance, where did you go?

The books editor of T+D magazine, Josie Rossi, and I seem to have spotted a trend. Or, should we say, an anti-trend.

Josie was remarking to me that she is having trouble finding recent (within the last couple of years) books on work-life balance to mention in her column. (She writes a sidebar called "If This, Then..." which offers a list of books similar to the main one reviewed each month.)

She spent two hours on Amazon.com yesterday she said, as well as time perusing catalogues of book publishers. And she came up with very little. The books she did find focused on the work aspect (how to manage your stress, for example) without the life component. I thought that was strange and said maybe work-life balance just petered out as a hot topic. I know it was all the rage not too long ago, but maybe it was overhyped.

Then it occurred to me that maybe the reason is the recession--which just happens to be a couple of years old. I bet that people haven't been focusing on work-life balance because they've been concentrating on not losing their jobs. Employees are working harder and more hours because with layoffs, companies are understaffed. But people don't feel secure enough in their jobs to complain.

I predict that as the economy recovers, work-life balance issues will come to the forefront again. Evidence? Josie just returned to my office to tell me there's a book coming out in May called The Time Divide: Work, Family, and Gender Inequality. But no additional information about the book is available on Amazon yet, which Josie says is unusual. It's almost as if the publisher wants to wait to see if the economy is truly bouncing back--and the issue returning to the minds of workers--before publicizing the book.

What do you think? Did we hit on something?

(Look for my March Intelligence column in T+D for discussion on whether the economy is truly recovering.)

Boost your brain

This Popular Science article tells how to increase your brain power. A lot of it is specific to science, but there's enough general information to make it a worthwhile read. (Warning: Taking the scientific assessment on page 2 could be damaging to your self-image. I scraped by with 4 correct out of 13 and consider myself lucky.)

If you're looking for more brain exercises, check out MyBrainTrainer.com, which bills itself as the world's first virtual mental gymnasium. The site requires subscription, but there is a free one-week trial available.

Technology that reads your mind (and how you can use telekinesis and telepathy)

I've been reading (in BBC News and the Boston Globe) about technology being developed that will enable users to control machines with just their brain waves. Yes, this sci-fi technology is actually coming to fruition and being tested. Successful trials have been completed with monkeys, and researchers are working on getting approval from the FDA to test on humans.

This technology will be especially helpful for people in the disabled community who will be able to manipulate objects without the use of their bodies. They will be able to type, control wheelchairs, even use robotic arms, the Globe says. That could be an amazing breakthrough. In the work world, it would create a new meaning for the word accessibility, opening up types of employment to people with disabilities that haven't been possible before. (Or just helping employed workers with disabilities who rely on older technologies, like voice recognition, that may not be as accurate or efficient.)

This technology could also create big changes for the rest of the workforce. I was wishing this morning that my computer could just read my mind and know what I wanted to do, so I wouldn't have to remember how to complete various tasks in Windows or Word. Often I can't remember (or don't know) which menu I need to look under to fix something. Wouldn't it be great if I could just think, "Change formatting to double-spaced" or some such thing and it would be done for me? My work would be task-based and the computer would adapt to me instead of the other way around.

Take away the computer-on-a-desk model and replace it with the ubiquitous or pervasive computing model that many are talking about and I could close my door or turn on the lights in my office with my brain waves; communicate with another person via text chat on my smart-watch just by thinking (this would be invaluable for soldiers in the field who can't make noise or hold a bulky device); or flip the pages of a professional magazine written with electronic ink while keeping my hands free for eating my lunch. The possibilities are endless and increase exponentially with other developing technologies. It's not a far cry from the dreams of many, telekinesis and telepathy.

Of course, someone will have to train everyone on how to do all this...

Are your learners visual illiterates? Are you?

To find out, read this article about the epidemic of visual illiteracy (not seeing what's right in front of you) and the Harvard professor who's working to combat it.

Thanks to the elearningpost daily links for pointing out the article.

How to set a negative tone in your training from the time learners walk into the classroom

This week I am in training, learning about newswriting at a local editorial consultancy. Maybe you'll notice a difference in my Intelligence column or this blog. Maybe not. You can let me know.

Anyhow, here is something that bothers me about the training. Posted prominently on the walls of the classroom and the inside of the door are signs that read

Classroom Policies
--no eating or drinking
--no using cell phones during class
--no surfing the Web or checking email

Granted, below the last two items are more instructions that begin with please. But, what's large and visible are the headings.

I feel like I'm back in grade school. The signs set a negative tone and make me feel like a child. In the writing world, we're told to restate negatives as positives. So here's what I would rather read:

Classroom Policies

--The lunchroom is provided for eating and drinking. Bringing food and drink into the classroom may damage the computers.

--Breaks are a good opportunity to check your phone messages or return calls. Leaving the classroom during instruction time may distract other students and/or the instructor.

--Feel free to browse the Web or check email during breaks or lunchtime. We want to make sure you get your money's worth of instruction!

Or, as I like to say when editing, SSBB. (Something Similar But Better) What I'm going for is a more positive tone as well as a logical explanation of why the rule was created.

Thoughts?

Google's not just a search engine; it's a way of life.

Is the Google toolbar a permanent fixture on your Web browser?

Do you use Google as a verb?

Have you ever Googled someone you just met to find out more about them?

Have you Googled old flames or ex-best friends to find out what they're up to?

If so, you're one of the many who find Google more than a handy tool. To its legions of fans, Google is a way of life.

Here's a good article on how to get more out of your Googling. And if you answered no to any of those questions, what are you waiting for? :)

The humble beginnings of videoconferencing, the mouse, hypertext, online collaboration, and just about everything else that matters in the computer world these days. (Okay, not quite, but still.)

This article from Wired is really interesting. Not only does it offer an inside look at the origins of these technologies we now take for granted (they were conceived of much earlier than you'd think), it also demonstrates what a few people with vision can achieve even when no one else "gets it" until much later.

Not to be missed: the photo of the first mouse, made out of a block of wood!