They say that even a blind squirrel will find a nut eventually, and I am living proof of that concept. So there I was at DevLearn 2014 locked in to speak at a couple of breakout sessions and facilitate a tabletop discussion at the crack of dawn on day one. I’m on a Performance Support mission of “seek and learn” and purely by accident I stumbled over a pre-conference session Tuesday afternoon before the conference ever started called the xAPI Hyperdrive. Yup…maybe not the squirrel metaphor but I found a nut I was not even looking for…and it changed my entire conference agenda.
Tag: learning @ point of work
When Einstein defined insanity as “Continuing to do what we’ve always done and expecting different results”, he was on the money. We continue to train with hopes that some form it…some technology enhanced venue of it…some exotic blend of it…is going to produce sustained capability that produces tangible business outcomes. Does training contribute to results? Sure it does, but does it sustain them? No, it cannot. It was never chartered nor was it scoped to do so.
A few years ago, I am quite certain, I would have been fighting this “cloud” concept tooth and nail. There was something about having my own staff running my own servers behind my own firewall that provided a sense of security and control. To an extent it did, and the IT staff would be the first to man the ramparts to fight off having anything living outside the firewall – much less allowing anyone outside to get into our systems. I feel their concern, and I respect the need to protect the network and data resources behind the firewall. So does that make a cloud-based LMS a better solution?
The point of work is a different, evolving venue for the consumption of learning assets, especially when we could consider mentor/mentee or apprentice/master craftsman relationships as “learning assets”. These different venues can be as “social” as they are downloadable asset-equipped. This evolution is a full 1,600-meter race, and the evolving venue has a ton of implications on the design, development, delivery, and/or accessibility of these assets. In fact, ADDIE needs to shed a few pounds and become more agile…producing content that is a little more nimble…a little more downstream-thinking in order to address the where, when, and how learning assets may be consumed.
A recent post “Evolving Training Into the Perfect Hole” brought a comment to me that I could really identify with as being a key challenge – justification for seriously considering learning @ the point of work. I find it stunning that the concept of learning @ the point of work is such a hard sell, especially when you consider that opportunities to learn and moments of potential failure happen at the same time…and very often in the same place – @ the point of work. Better training…or more training…have little-to-nothing to do with justification. What could you possible justify in the absence of real risk?
Deployment gets you to the end-of-training celebration party and the three-bite shrimp, the balloons, the creepy clowns, and the face painting. A frightfully high percentage of system knowledge packed into the heads and hearts of learners evaporates [unreinforced knowledge retention loss] almost before all the confetti is swept up from the gala celebration. Then comes something called GoLive, and heads and hearts that were “certified as ready”, struggle with crippled recall knowledge; some users settling for feelings of success when they can remember enough to sign-on to SAP or the EMR the first time. Now our learners are in their downstream, post-training environment called the work context. Now they are outside of the scope and charter of most training organizations. Now they are most dangerous. As Satchel Paige said, “It’s not what you don’t know that can hurt you; it’s what you think you know that just ain’t so!”