Nice Blog on eLearning Course Design

Although I'm generally ambivalent about the whole idea of eLearning 2.0 Tony Karrer has quite a few practical tips on eLearning design regardless of the version of your eLearning.

I found the breakdown of specific types of users (and the implication that you must design activities for each) quite helpful

Spectator / Joiner / Creator Levels of Participation

One of the best decisions we made early in the design of the course was to define different levels of participation in the course. Here's how we defined it:

Each week we will share new activities that will allow you to explore each of these tools. We recognize that there will be differences in interest, experience and time available for exploration, so these activities will be designed to give you meaningful experiences at different levels:

* The Spectator--These will be exercises or activities that should take approximately 15 minutes to complete. The Spectator level is for people who want just a quick exploration of the tools and minimal interaction.

* The Joiner/Collector--For those who want to delve more deeply into a particular Web 2.0 tool, the Joiner/Collector level will consist of activities that take approximately 30 minutes to complete.

* The Creator--These activities are for people who want to really spend some time exploring and trying out a particular tool or set of tools. The activities will take approximately 75 minutes to complete and will allow you to immerse yourself in the Web 2. 0 experience.

Of course I think this breakdown works if you delete all the references to web 2.0.

And I think these different styles of learning/levels of engagement actually apply to the [Instructor Led] classroom as well.

I am the Enemy (a.ka. the SME)

Over on the Rapid eLearning Blog there is an interesting post on dealing with SME's.

At a recent conference, we were asked what typically held up the production process for elearning courses. The number one response was working with the subject matter expert. This makes sense since they play such a critical role in the course’s success.

The subject matter experts know the content and understand the work environment. Because of this, much of your project hinges on their time and the commitment they make to the project. The challenge is that our subject matter experts are like the rest of us and just don’t have a lot of time to spare.

Fortunately (or unfortunately) in my career, I've always been in relatively small/informal training teams where the SME, Course Developer, and Instructor were the same person: me.

When doing technical training, the idea of an instructor teaching courses he/she didn't develop has always bothered me. In my training program at Tenable I certainly work with product engineering to help fill in gaps of my product knowledge, but how as an instructor/course developer can you depend on someone else to "know the content and the work environment?"

Having mastery of the content is the third leg of the stool that also includes curriculum and instructional methods.

What really bugs me about "E-Learning 2.0"

So my previous post on must have struck a nerve.

And while I take no offense (ironically, that is my current job title on business card, which I must change when I get new ones, says "training specialist." But I guess I'm supposed to be offended that Dr. Karrer doesn't consider me a training specialist.

saw a post by Matthew Franz - where he tells us - I don't get e-learning 2.0 - and it made me wonder if Franz is a training specialist - who's not looking at more than training as a model for learning.

But forget about that...

The key issue is whether learning|teaching|training|education|instruction are fundamentally altered by these supercool "2.0" technologies like wikis?

When I taught Reading & Texas History to 7th & 8th graders, in both subjects focusing on critical thinking skills and using techniques like the Socratic seminars espoused by folks like Mortimer Adler, that was definitely education. When I taught TCP/IP Security and Open Source network security tools that was purely training (clearly more worthy, if less lucrative) as is the current courses I teach on Tenable products.

I'd like to think there is a bit of education in some of the training I teach. I'd also like to think that maybe reading Paulo Freire makes me a better able to teach about vulnerability and compliance management and allow security auditors to name the pain of dealing with obtuse requirements.

I admit there is no small amount of irony that principles developed for teaching literacy to Brazilian peasants might be applicable to teaching for-profit courses to folks who have (or aspire to have) six figure salaries, but I digress.

The problem I have with this concept of "eLearning 2.0" and all the hype about blogs and wikis (both of which I know and love and one of which I do use in my ILT classes and in my own personal learning, MoinMoin Desktop Edition rules!) is that it seems yet another educational fad, another "gamechanger" marketed to teachers and trainers that does not fundamentally alter the equation. Why even adopt the lingo of 1.0/2.0?

How is a blog any more revolutionary (or fundamentally) different than Nancie Atwell's Reading-Writing workshop? Since I'm not a training specialist (but a security technologist and practitioner that happens to develop and deliver training and is current working developing an eLearning solution) I don't keep up with adult learning and instructional design as much as I should, but as a public school teacher and a student of the history of education that there are wave after wave of fads which are often mindlessly adopted by (or forced down the throat of) of teachers.

When I was a technology trainer, when I developed the first Internet use policy for my school down in Texas, when we evaluated proposals from the teaching staff on how they would integrate technology into their classrooms in the mid 1990s I heard the same sort of pie in the sky buzzwords that I see on these e-Learning 2.0.

When I taught history, I used collaborative writing software with my students back in the mid 1990s. These were MacLC II's with LocalTalk vs. AJAX and TCP/IP. And no, I don't see Google Documents as fundamentally revolutionary in the context of training or instruction--or at least no more revolutionary than outside the use of training. It is not wikis don't provide value they just don't provide any more value in the context of teaching and learning than in their "normal" use.

The hype about eLearning 2.0 smacks of another fad which does not fundamentally alter the effectiveness of teachers and the learning of students. I actually do think wikis are revolutionary and were a fundamental tool in my toolkit when I was a consultant. But I do not believe they are more revolutionary in the classroom than outside the classroom. Training and learning must adopt the tools and techniques of the workplace (and typically adopts these later than the workplace, right?). Congrats, trainers are able to keep up. Barely.

Even (as my coworkers would attest) though I'm a bit of a WikiZealot, I view the latest and greatest with suspicion. Just another buzzword just like "whole language" "reader response theory" that teachers will grudgingly adopt because they have to, because it is the new dominant paradigm.

Truth be told, my skepticism is probably also based on the fact that deep down I believe Learning (meaning instructor led training, although I obviously realize that learning does not require an instructor and was a big fan of collaborative learning and student-led learning) is always preferable to eLearning. It is just not always practical. eLearning is a cheap, but scalable, substitute for the real thing if the real thing cannot be had. This bias probably impacts my view of the discussion of the value of these technologies.

I don't get e-learning 2.0

So I find blogs like Examples of eLearning 2.0 sort of curious.

  * Alongside Formal Learning
        o Blog as writing tool
        o Wiki as a collaborative learning tool
  * Editable reference materials (Wiki)
        o Internal / External Product information
        o Process information
        o Sales scenarios
        o Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) / support information
        o Online reference / glossary
  * Experience Capture
        o New-hire blog
        o Maintaining a “lab or project notebook”
  * RSS Reader, Podcasts - Steady Drip

While these examples make sense and I've been using (and advocating the use of) wikis as fundamental tools within teams since 2003 ever since I ran across the Cisco Engineering Wiki which ran MoinMoin, I just don't get why folks are trying to lump in these core technologies as "e-learning."

RSS, Blog, Wikis, etc. are fundamental workplace tools in the same way that other tools (office applications, web applications, the Internet etc.) are also tools, but think of the absurdity of making a big deal of Excel as an "e-learning 1.0 tool."

Is it because corporate trainers (I am one now, so I can critique them) are so backward and 2.0-illiterate? Is that why this is a big deal? To me if you make the definition of "e-learning" so expansive (and yes, I realize there is overlap between e-learning and knowledge management but to classify knowledge management activities as learning seem silly) it makes the term almost meaningless. Yes, everything you do should be about learning and creating knowledge, but this is different from Learning with a Big-L and little-l learning. What am I missing here?

Spaf: You can't have 94 centers of excellence

I have a 45 minute commute (not bad at all for the region) each way so I spend lots of time listening to the radio and one of the first (annoying) things I noticed was the amount of advertising about "information assurance" training programs out there targeting the "hot IT security field." Some of these justify their expertise ("you'll learn from the best!") based on their NSA Center of Excellence accreditation.

Weak.

And Spaf nails it when he justifies Purdue's decision not to remain in the program

More importantly, this goes to the heart of what it means to be “trustworthy.” Security and privacy issues are based on a concept of trust and that also implies honesty. It simply is not honest to continue to participate in (and thereby support) a designation that is misleading. There are not 94 centers of excellence in information and cyber security in the US. You might ask the personnel at some of the schools that are so designated as to why they feel the need to participate and shore up that unfortunate canard.

While this is true, I think there is definitely something else going on here that reflects the changes (and more importantly the ambivalence about the changes) in [Computer|Network|Information] field over the last decade. As knowledge goes mainstream, as a discipline no longer remains in the realm of experts or "the Academy" (as they would say in the culture wars of the 90s) there is always the temptation to lament the "watering down" of a field of expertise. This is also seen in the division between the "Security Education" v. "Security Training" and I'm not sure what the difference is.  As Liberal Arts grad, I saw (and still see) Computer Science/Engineer programs essentially all as training whether the program is at a suburban community college or a major land grant university. 

Go To a Non-Technical (Non-Security) Conference, Dummy!

So I've been to a lot of conferences and trade-shows over the past 15 years, but the last two days at the SALT Interactive Technologies Conference in Crystal City has been refreshing and not just because I took the MARC down.

I also learned that taking public transportation from Western Maryland is sort of impractical, because each way the commute took over 2 hours. But I was able to work the majority of the time, so it wasn't wasted time and there were only a few places on the Brunswick Line the EVDO faded out.

My main objective in a attending the conference was to brush up on instructional design and get a jump start on e-Learning tools and technologies. But there were three things that I noticed that were refreshingly different from most of the technical security conferences I've been to as long as I can remember.

1) There weren't all the big egos.

2) The speakers could actually communicate effectively.

3) There was none of "the sky is falling"/"we are so F-d" talk that seems to be the norm.

Among the better presentations were by Marie-Pierre Huguet (on blending constructivism and behaviorism in instructional, a talk on thinking strategically (when developing eLearning solutions) by Mark Siegel.

There was also really good talk on rapid development of training using a modified spiral development model used quickly develop FISA training on the Protect America Act last summer. So you can guess the agency affiliation of these "DoD" and bah.com duo that gave the talk.

So if you've been doing security (or technology) for more than 5-6 years (that was about when I started to get restless and start wishing for a career change that would never come) I encourage you to find a business, or training, or knowledge management -- or something non-technical for a change of pace.

You won't regret it!

Prez & Pedagogy on The Wire

I wouldn't know about policing or politics (although all the SIGINT doesn't seemed too far-fetched) but in Season 4, much of the school story line is spot on. Or at least based on my 3 years teaching in a Middle School.

Of course I wasn't in a failing inner city Middle School like Mr. P (coincidentally, so many of my kid's teachers here on the Chicago North Shore have have even more unpronounceable Polish names, but I digress...) but a lot of it still rings true.

After college (think Netscape IPO time), I taught 7th and 8th in a school that implemented many of Ted Sizer's ideas on school reform on the Northwest side of San Antonio, where kids lived in the same gated community as David Robinson and George Strait.

Although I had my share of "challenging" kids not I can't remember being told to Fuck Off like Mr. P and the only blood I ever saw in the class room was from bloody noses.

And although I left teaching (for tech) over ten years ago, so many of the scenes in the latest (meaning what we are watching now) season take me (and my wife, who was also a teacher) back to our frightening "first year" and give me a sick feeling in my stomach.

Stuff like getting your classroom ready. Never being prepared enough. That awful silence in the morning that will soon be broken when the door opens. The perceived weakness and lack of confidence that let's your classes get out of control (relatively speaking, of course). The older female teachers that get the respect you wish you could command -- and the fear, which you hope you never will. The making it up as you go along, figuring out a month in what you should have done the first day (like come up with a classroom management plan). And then there's the good stuff, too. Creating that fragile bond with your students. And the humor and the tragedy. We've just finished Disc 2 so it will be interesting to see where this ends up.