Will at Work Learning

Support Elliott Masie's War on Frivolous LMS Trademarks

I urge you to support Elliott Masie's war on frivolous LMS Trademarks. Here's what Elliott wrote in his newsletter:

Help! Defend Learning Field from Patent Suit! The learning "patent trolls" are at it again. There is a company called IPLearn that has unfortunately successfully sued over a dozen learning management system - claiming they have invented many of the core elements of technology delivered learning.  Sure, they wrote several clever patents that claim to have created much of the field - and, with an understaffed patent office, it was approved - though there were many prior learning and technology implementations.  And, their strategy, which has worked, is to sue a company - get the discovery and legal costs up and up, and finally settle for a fee and stock shares.  All, without having invented, produced or created anything - other than a few patent apps.

I have worked, without fee, against their efforts several times and now they are at it again.  They have brought suits against several major LMS companies - and I am asking Learning TRENDS readers to help gather any manuals, documents or other experiences you have had with these earlier corporate learning systems:

• Registrar,” by Silton-Bookman Systems.
• Learning Organization Information System (LOIS),” by KnowledgeSoft, Inc.
• Etude,” by Gerald Hollingsworth and GPU, Inc.
• Continuous Learning System (CLS),” by AT&T Global Information Solutions International, Inc.

The lawyers defending against the IPLearn suit would love to see any samples of anything that describes the operation or public availability of these systems.  For example:  user manuals, help files, demonstration videos, brochures, press releases, and actual program disks/CDs. 

If you can help, would you send a note to my office at emasie@masie.com and we will contact you back.  Many thanks!

While I'm not a trademark expert, and I support people and organizations who truly do create something new and unique, trademarks that aren't deserving hurt our industry and our learners.

Acknowledging Annie's Career -- A Thank You Note

It’s not every day that a valued client “retires” from a company to which she has devoted a good part of her career. I’ve known Annie Laures for almost half a decade in my role as an outside consultant and work-learning auditor. I’d like to take a moment and acknowledge her work at Walgreens—and wish her well as she begins a new adventure as a consultant to chief learning officers, training directors, and learning professionals.

Annie retired as Walgreens Director of Learning Services after a 32-year career helping Walgreens’ pharmacists, store managers, service clerks, corporate managers and others learn and succeed in their jobs. 

Here's Annie's picture from a relaxed informal moment.

Annie’s accomplishments are too many and varied to recite here. Here’s a short list. In her learning-executive role heading up learning services, Annie directed the overall learning strategy for Walgreens, led multiple teams and units of learning professionals, and worked closely with business management and operations. Annie has also led the Performance Development and Training and Development units at Walgreens. She’s led leadership development. She led the transition from classroom-only training to an integrated e-learning system. She’s created customer-service initiatives, developed videos, done executive coaching, managed instructional design, built 360-degree instruments, and helped Walgreens as it merged with other corporations.

Annie has long been active in the International Society of Performance Improvement, won an award, and earned her Certified Performance Technology designation. Annie has presented at various industry conferences, including a presentation she and I did together titled “Is Your Learning Organization Healthy?”

Annie’s colleagues remember her as a person of integrity, wisdom, and a deep and practical knowledge of learning. They also remember her as someone with a quirky sense of humor. “Often she would tell you a story that was off-the-wall but she would do it with such a straight face that you believe her. One time she mentioned that the new hire missed her dog so much that we agreed she could take it to work.”

For me, Annie represented the best kind of client. She wanted to do the right thing and create learning interventions that really worked. She was politically savvy enough know what would fly and what would be derailed by management. She worked within the system to get the best results possible. Annie was also just a joy to work with—friendly, open, direct, personable, and caring. She also had great instincts about learning and performance. Her recommendations and thinking were almost always aligned with research and best practices. But perhaps the most remarkable thing about Annie was her willingness to be open to new ideas and improvement in learning-and-performance design. Her inquisitive non-defensive nature helped her and Walgreens Learning to continue moving forward in continuing cycles of improvement. Annie just seemed to want to do what was right for the learners of Walgreens. It never appeared to be about her.

When a person has a passion to make things better, when they are focused on the general good (and not themselves so much), when they are skilled at getting things done, and when they are open—truly open—to learning, the world will become a better place because of their actions. To me, that seems the story of Annie Laures career at Walgreens.

I want to acknowledge Annie’s Walgreens work and also thank Annie for hiring me when my research-and-consulting practice really needed the work. I also want to wish Annie the best as she opens up her consulting practice. If you’d like to inquire about Annie’s consulting services, contact her at this email.

Thanks Annie!!

Congrats to Hilary Wilder on her Fulbright Scholarship

Back in the early 1990's I was involved in a project which we ended up calling the Classroom, Inc. project. It was a joint venture between Teachers College, Columbia University (where I was a doctoral student); Morgan Stanley, the Mariposa Foundation led by Morgan Stanley's COO Lewis Bernard, and the New York City Public Schools. The project was designed to help at-risk kids in Brooklyn learn about business and to empower them to think like business leaders. It was a great project and has blossomed into a full not-for-profit organization that continues to do great work---taking it way beyond what we were able to do.

I was the project leader on the learning-development simulation-development side of the project. We built two computer-based simulations and accompanying learning materials. The programming wizard and educational technology guru on the project was Hilary Wilder, who played many other roles as well. It has been a pleasure to see her career unfold over the years since then.

Recently Hilary won a Fulbright scholarship to do educational technology work in Namibia, where she has been involved for years.

WP Perspective, a publication of William Paterson University, where Dr. Wilder is an Associate Professor, published the following article about Hilary's Fulbright. I couldn't be more proud. Congratulations Hilary!!

Hilary Wilder, associate professor in the educational leadership and professional studies department, has been named a Fulbright Scholar for the spring 2010 semester. She will be lecturing and conducting research at the University of Namibia (UNAM). The university, with an enrollment of 10,000 students, is the sparsely populated, African country’s only comprehensive four-year institution of higher education.

Wilder will also be establishing Namibia’s first and only master’s program in educational technology, her area of expertise.

“The people of Namibia are very open to new ideas,” Wilder says. “I’m really excited about the opportunity to develop an educational technology master’s degree program, in a country which so desperately needs it. I’m hoping this program will help create a solid cadre of local expertise in educational technology.”

Her work dovetails with a national development plan established by the Namibian government called Vision 2030, which calls for a shift to a knowledge-based economy by 2030. “Before independence in 1990, Namibia’s education system was based on apartheid practices and the majority of its children were taught through low-level rote-learning, often in rural bush schools with no resources. Today they are eager to move forward and ensure that their children will be successful and productive twenty-first century global citizens. The government, private sector, non-governmental organizations and international organizations such as the World Bank are all committed to making this happen“ she says.

Wilder will be working with teachers who will go on to become educational technology experts in their schools— helping their peers integrate technology literacy into the curriculum and their teaching. “There will be a trickle-down effect,” Wilder says. “My students will learn the technology integration skills, and take that back to their fellow teachers. The idea is that by 2030 the students who are then taught by those teachers will have acquired the technological literacy skills necessary to be a part of the knowledge-based economy.”

  
WP Perspectives, Vol.7 No. 1 April 2009, p. 7

One of the things that sets Hilary apart is that she is able to bring together a background in learning and educational theory and research (as a graduate of both Teachers College Columbia AND Harvard schools of education) WHILE at the same time bringing practical wisdom to her work (with her real-world experience as programmer, instructional designer, and educational technology specialist). The ability to bridge the theory/research side and the practice side is fundamental to making on-the-ground improvement in the learning field. We can all aspire to follow Hilary's path.

Geary Rummler Tribute at ISPI. Will's Notes and Reflections.

Tonight at the ISPI conference in Orlando, I attended a tribute to Geary Rummler, who recently died after a long and distinguished career in the “Performance-Improvement Field.”

I didn’t know Geary, so I didn’t know how I would react or how long I would stay. I brought my laptop to do emails while I listened. I sat in the back of the cavernous ballroom.

I became transfixed as speaker after speaker who had worked closely with Geary talked about his work and the contributions he made to the field.

The following is my stream of consciousness note-taking with some later annotations. Not worthy of a tribute, but perhaps enough to help me remember some of Geary’s work—and perhaps enough to encourage YOU to take a look at his books and writings.

Notes and Annotations

Entrepreneurial experimentation. Science and sweat. Learning through trial and error.
Creating one-week program on programmed instruction. Didn’t have time to tell, to present objectives, etc. Showed them, had them practice. Curiosity, interested in what did NOT work, not just what DID work. Pre-Testing then Programmed Instruction then Maintenance of Behavior. Annotation: Even way back in the 1960’s and 1970’s someone was thinking about maintaining performance after training, and we are still struggling to get most of the field to do this.

After the initial workshop was developed and deployed, then Management of Behavior Change Workshop. Then General Systems theory workshop. Started small and specific—built up to systems.
During 1960’s Geary and colleagues wouldn’t do training without a thorough front-end needs analysis. 

Annotation: Hmmm. With today’s pressures, many are eschewing FEA.

Geary rebuffed a man who insulted one of his woman colleagues by telling him, “Shut up, she knows more than you do.”

Praxis (a Geary company) had a mission (we didn’t earn that much money speaker said)—to make the world a better place by improving the place where people worked. Annotation:

One of Geary’s former colleagues sang a song in tribute (a tear-inducing moment).

Geary was an engineer. Geary worked with Tom Gilbert. Helped plan Motorola University. Did coaching of functional managers of manufacturing curriculum. One of nice things about Geary is that as a consultant as he learned—he would even tell about the mistakes he made.

Quote from Geary (paraphrased): “Beware of false prophets, the HR people, who would rank and rate you, but don’t really understand the organization.”

Article: “You want performance, not just training.”

Did Situation analysis. Asked these questions: (1) What is happening now? (2) What should be happening?, THEN Define desired outputs. “As-is” “To-Be”

This all become six-sigma, etc. Annotation: Several people said Geary’s work became basis for the Six-Sigma movement, TQM, etc.

Geary said: You’ve got a lot of white space on the org chart you need to manage.

Annotation: People like Geary and his colleagues have been doing very valuable stuff for years (For example, they got cycle time from 17 weeks to 5 days), but why hasn’t this spread? Why hasn’t this performance-based approach gradually knocked-out the dominant training-based approach?

Rummler stuff got repackaged into 6-sigma stuff. Motorola bought license from Geary Rummler’s stuff into 6-sigma and TQM.

Geary’s true legacy: Changed the lens we all look through, moving from training to performance improvement.

Provided a common language:
White space, disconnects, organization as a system, cross-functional processes.

Geary Rummler: Managing the whitespace:

Performance Design Lab (Came out of retirement and started/joined this company).
Geary retired, but had to come back and knew the world didn’t get it and had to get back in the game, forming Performance Design Lab in 2000, where they were focusing on performance management systems (maintaining  improvement after the performance improvement).

Serious Performance Consulting. A Geary Book.

Geary always had to have a vehicle for packaging  his insights into his workshops and his books in ways that would make sense for people.

A speaker said, “He believed that it could be possible to create a prosperous society by construction a good system that will hold successful organizations and generate superior results.”

Two places that Geary touched, who seem to want to use Geary’s work to improve the world. Performance Improvement Institute in Cd. Obregon. Sonora Inst of Tehcnol and norwest of Mexico.

Geary Quote: “We cannot continue working the way we are expecting to get different results.”
Speaker quote (paraphrased): “Geary would share his materials more than anyone I know, I think because he was a learner, he wanted us all to know enough so that he could  discuss with us and we could learn together.”

Drinking alcohol and developing relationships with good discussions was a recurring theme. Many stories about drinks being drunk.

“If you put a good performer in a bad system the system wins every time.” Quote from Geary Rummler.

One speaker, quieted by tears, haltingly spoke about imagining Geary becoming a star in the sky…

Annotation: I really didn’t know that much about Geary’s work, but now I am motivated to learn more. Also, I’m glad I went because it gave me nice perspective on the field, even knowing that this “history” was filtered through the lens of tribute protocol.

Bottom line: I was touched and I’m motivated to learn more. Thanks to ISPI for providing this, for all the speakers (who I apologize for failing to capture their names), and for all the people who came to Orlando especially for the tribute.

Here are two of Geary's most popular books:

Report on Learning Management Systems

Training Media Review, a hearteningly unbiased source, just releases its 2009 report on Learning Management Systems.

Click to learn more...

Adobe E-Learning Suite

As predicted, Adobe is on the march to monopolize the e-learning development world.

Their new suite.

Have they really integrated intelligence about human learning in there? Not sure, but I'm skeptical. If you're a competitor, that's probably your only path to success. If you're Adobe, that may be your only weak link.

My services are available.

Chicagoland Learning Conference This Friday

This Friday the Chicagoland Learning Leaders are meeting in their annual conference. This is a fantastic group and I know that some of my smartest Chicago-area clients are going to be there in droves. Unfortunately, I can't make it, but I heard great things about this last year and if you're in the Chicago area this is not to be missed. Click here for more information. It's their 7th Annual Conference, so they must know what they're doing!!

Purchasing eLearning Tools? Consider Adobe!

I'm writing you from the eLearning Guild's annual conference. I went to a session presented by Silke Fleischer and colleagues at Adobe and was blown away by the work Adobe is doing to create products that support learning and related efforts. I then asked a number of industry thought leaders who confirmed my interpretation: Adobe is now a 500-pound Gorilla, likely to continue out-investing their competitors and thus creating better and better products for folks like us to use.

If you're considering elearning tools, you owe it to your organization to consider Adobe products. I have no financial relationship with Adobe, by the way. This is not to say that other products aren't worthy and/or do some things better than Adobe products. My thinking is this: Companies who invest in their products are often more likely to be there for you in the years to come. I've seen many clients who started using a particular tool five-to-ten years ago, and they are basically stuck with it because of their large installed base of learning courses.

Here are a few of the things that made me wake up and take notice:

1. Adobe's update cycle on Captivate seems to be shrinking, as they are aggressively moving forward in the development of Captivate 4.
2. Captivate is being used for many purposes, including the development of Podcasts, Advertising, etc.
3. You can embed a working Captivate file into Adobe connect and then have webinar or online-learning participants each interact with Captivate objects.
4. PDF files can now include fully-functional interactive images. So documents are not static anymore!!
5. Adobe is working on a new platform called AIR, which will enable the compilation of many types of objects for display and interaction.

Elliott Masie's LMS Wish List

Elliott Masie came up with a great and very insightful wish list for LMS's. Click here to access it. He even added a few suggestions in the past few days, probably based on feedback from his loyal audience.

I really like the richness that Elliott's suggestions might create for a typical LMS. Most LMS implementations are just a list of course offerings.

On the other hand, I worry about overly complicating options for users. Most workers just don't have extra time to waste. Maybe the suggestion to let users rate the courses comes into play here.

I also worry about user-generated content. It can be great, could be better than what the training folks can create, could engender more engagement, could be bottom line more effective. But we should all recognize that it is a double-edge sword. User generated content could be incorrect, could be a huge waste of time, could cause the organization to leave itself vulnerable to legal liability.

Doesn't Fix the Biggest Problem with the LMS Mentality

The biggest problem with LMS's can't be fixed with Elliott's suggestions. The biggest problem is that the whole LMS face sends a powerful hidden message that "learning" is about taking courses or accessing other learning events. This "Learning Means Sitting" LMS mentality infiltrates whole organizations.

I've seen this recently with one of my clients, a huge retailer, where their LMS has encouraged store managers and other store leaders to focus learning time on taking courses, in lieu of coaching, learning from each other, trying things out and getting feedback, encouraging store employees to take responsibility for particular areas, etc. It's not that they completely ignore these other learning opportunities; it's that the LMS focuses everyones' time and attention on courses, creating a lot of wasted effort.

To get the most from an LMS, you ought to throw away your LMS and start over. People can learn something—develop competencies/skills—from courses or from other means. A competency-management system that offers multiple means to develop oneself is ideal, where courses/events are just one option. I still haven't seen a commercial system that does this though...Most are course first designs.

Maybe I'm too over-the-top recommending that we get rid of all LMS's. I make the statement to highlight the humongous problems that the LMS mentality is causing.

Starbucks to Shutdown for Training.

Starbucks is shutting all its stores on February 26th for three hours to train or retrain its employees.

You can read related articles at the following links:

Seattle Times

Starbuck Gossip (Blog)

Marketplace (Audio, story starts at 19:42 mins:secs)

Street Insider

The question will be, is the training well-designed?

Wednesday morning February 27th will give only a partial answer. March, April, and May will be more important. And of course, maybe this has nothing to do with training at all. Maybe it's a store management problem. Maybe the brand is too diluted, no longer special. Maybe competition from Dunkin' Donuts and McDonalds is creating issues, especially as consumers try to save money in these uncertain economic times.

Will the training work? Stay tuned.