Bottom-Line Performance

Each week Brandon Penticuff, Bottom-Line Performance’s Director of Technology and admitted app-obsessed iOS user will share an app that he is using that week. Whether it is an app to make you more productive, teach you something, or simply entertain you, we hope that you’ll enjoy learning about them!

This week’s app is “SayHi Translate”, an extremely impressive “Pocket Interpreter” that will enable you to quickly translate phrases that you speak out loud into many different languages. Your conversation can also be translated the other way, with your communication partner’s response also being translated back into your primary language.

It may sound complicated, but it really isn’t. The app’s design is incredible, it’s hard to imagine it being any more simple to use. The design mimics a text-messaging conversation between two people (one blue, one green). The blue represents the Primary language chosen, and the green side represents the Secondary language. The application defaults to English and Spanish respectively, but you can set either to one of over 30 available languages in the settings menu. When you tap one of the supported languages and speak it, it automatically translates the text of what you said into the message window, and then speaks your phrase out loud and provides the text of the translation as well. This let’s you not only confirm what it is attempting to translate, but visually see the translation once it is completed. An entire conversation can be maintained within the app, and then selectively shared via email, text message, Twitter, or Facebook.

In addition to providing a handy way for you to quickly communicate with someone that doesn’t speak your language, you can also use this app to practice your fluency and pronunciation with a foreign language you are trying to learn. By tapping on the Secondary button you can speak in that language and have it confirm with you what it heard, and then translate it back into your Primary chosen language. By using the tool this way, you can practice your speaking skills and work to perfect your intonation and clarity.

I absolutely love apps like this that provide multiple uses, are cleverly designed, and leverage the ability of my iOS devices in new and interesting ways. Throw in the fact that it’s a universal app that works on both the iPad and iPhone with a single purchase and this one is easy to recommend.

SayHi Translate – [.99] (Universal App)

Note: This app is currently on sale for .99 and will be $2.99 after a introductory period.

Follow Brandon on Twitter for more tips and tracks on all things App related. Got an app you want featured? Send him a tweet to have it considered!

Each week Brandon Penticuff, Bottom-Line Performance’s Director of Technology and admitted app-obsessed iOS user will share an app that he is using that week. Whether it is an app to make you more productive, teach you something, or simply entertain you, we hope that you’ll enjoy learning about them!

This week’s app is “Art Authority for iPad”, an amazing virtual museum that will put over 50,000 of the worlds best artistic works at your fingertips on your iPad (a separate app is available for iPhone). You can browse the app by it’s 8 period-specific rooms that each contain a museum’s worth of content, or you can search an artist by name and view all the available pieces from their collection. The app is incredibly robust, featuring art from over 2,000 museums from across the globe.

In addition to giving you with a virtual museum to explore, the app also provides other clever features to help you get the most out of your experience. “Art Like This” let’s you immediately bring up similar pieces to your current selection, expanding your awareness of other works and artists that you might have otherwise not easily found. “Art Near Me” is a location based feature that helps alert you to what pieces are near your current location, giving you options to consider for making a day-trip to your local museum to see something first hand. You’ll likely be amazed by the number of pieces that are within a couple miles of your location! These features are part of the reason that the New York Times reported that for art on your iPad, Art Authority for the iPad has no rival.

In addition to increasing your personal cultural awareness and art appreciation, the arts have role to play in sparking our creativity and informing our designs. I’d like to share two quotes with you that I think speak to this better than I could:

“In my own philanthropy and business endeavors, I have seen the critical role that the arts play in stimulating creativity and in developing vital communities….the arts have a crucial impact on our economy and are an important catalyst for learning, discovery, and achievement in our country.”
–Paul G. Allen, Co-Founder, Microsoft

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have lots of dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solution without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”
–Steve Jobs

So maybe you haven’t made time in quite a while to visit a museum or perhaps that Bachelor of the Arts degree could use a refresher. An app like this one lets you use the most cutting edge technology of today to bring some of history’s best works to you.

Art Authority for iPad- [$4.99 (Currently on sale half-price)]

Follow Brandon on Twitter for more tips and tracks on all things App related. Got an app you want featured? Send him a tweet to have it considered!

Each week Brandon Penticuff, Bottom-Line Performance’s Director of Technology and admitted app-obsessed iOS user will share an app that he is using that week. Whether it is an app to make you more productive, teach you something, or simply entertain you, we hope that you’ll enjoy learning about them!

This week’s app is “Pocket”, an really cool way for you to store various content that you find on-line and want to read or watch later. Perhaps the best way to think of Pocket is to imagine it as a DVR for the internet. Let’s say you were reading Steve Boller’s great post “Trainers: Is Gladwell’s 10,000 Rule a Hoax? ” and didn’t have time to finish it. With Pocket, you would just save it for later and finish it when you had time, across any of your devices or computers.

Now your first thought might be “I can just bookmark a link in my browser”, and of course that’s true. However a browser bookmark typically stays tied to that browser and that computer, you likely aren’t setup to have it automatically populated out to each of your devices. Also, when your app syncs on a given device, it also stores the data locally so you don’t have to have a constant internet connection to read what’s in your Pocket. There are other apps out there like Instapaper that provide similar services, however with it’s recent redesign, Pocket (formerly “Read it Later”) has absolutely raised the bar in design and functionality. Extending the value of Pocket, many of the most popular Apps for content consumption like FlipBoard, Zite, Twitter, and more provide methods for saving your content directly into your Pocket account.

While some have expressed concern about the negative impact that technology and the internet in particular has had on long-form reading, there have been indications that the iPad is providing some relief to this trend. Apps like Pocket can help you save meaningful content for later and get the most out of your digital tools. When viewing your content you can sort it by image, video, or text and you can even apply tags to your content to help with later sorting and retrieval.

So what will you keep in your Pocket? Do you think apps like this can help sustain long-form content in a byte-size world?

Pocket – [FREE] (Universal App)

Follow Brandon on Twitter for more tips and tracks on all things App related. Got an app you want featured? Send him a tweet to have it considered!

 Well, no…but some trainers seem to think so.

In the age of “awareness level training” and “click next to continue” courses designed to check a box or meet regulatory requirements, we risk missing out on opportunities to really let learning happen. Awareness may be necessary, but it’s just the beginning. If your training program begins and ends with “awareness,” you’re missing the boat.

 Malcolm Gladwell did an excellent job of showing us that it takes 10,000 hours to be a master at virtually any discipline. If companies want to distill “training” into 5 and 10 minute sound bytes, what does that say about the overall competence of their workforce?

We seem to forget that awareness is just the beginning of the learning process. Yes, it’s important: I cannot take an action until I am aware of the need to do so. But in order to invest my time and energy into taking that action, I will need to be motivated and really believe that the action has value to me and to my company. Training is not learning, and the course you are going to make me take is only the beginning of my discovery process. If we treat it like the end-all, I’m never actually going to learn anything. No wonder many workers feel alienated by the Learning and Development department.

Awareness has its time and place….but we need to make a distinction between training and communication. Training should be used when you need to teach someone how to do something. It needs to be specific, actionable, and measurable. Communication should be used to convey a message or make someone aware of something. For example, an effective chain of company communication might make your learners aware that they need training and reach them in such a way that they become intrinsically motivated to do what is necessary to learn that skill. The training that you then provide will serve as a starting point and guide for their learning, but learners are still going to have to take responsibility for their own skill-building. The brain doesn’t have any hands for us to hold…it has to do the heavy lifting all by its lonesome.

It’s also important to keep in mind that everyone does not need the same level of awareness all the time. Even if a piece of information or procedure seems integral to everyone in your company, chances are people only need to use or reference it at most for a small part of their day. Or maybe only a certain segment of people need to use it at all. It is perfectly adequate and appropriate to make your learners aware of safety documents and procedures, but if the roll-out is not timed right and months go by between awareness training and the time when knowledge recall is needed, your outcome will be less than ideal. Design training around your desired outcome, not the content you think you need to include.

Remember that awareness is more about motivation than information. Pique your learners’ interests, make them aware of the problem, and give them the resources they need to go out and learn what they need to learn. Then, get out of the way and let it happen, supporting the process as needed. It may take 10,000 hours to achieve mastery in a field, but chances are you can measurably improve your results by making some small steps in the right direction.

How many years of formal education have you received in your life? 16? 18? 20? We like to think we are pretty smart, but what did we really learn?

 

The technological advances of the industrial revolution created huge demand for a certain type of individual: follows instructions, sticks to procedure, generates predictable results, easy to manage. The pedagogical practices of schools adapted to meet these demands. Think about standing in straight lines, sitting in rows of desks, or reciting things as a group. Ever wonder why?

Unschooling is essentially the idea that an educational system which is founded on the age of industrialism trains students to achieve in only a strict narrow focus. The lack of freedom in choosing the path of education and the constraints of focusing on what is deemed important by industry or society, squashes.  Ewan McIntosh on edu.blog laments that the failure of a factory style, one size fits all education became “depressingly clear” when an elementary aged child expressed his sole learning goal was to “get a five” on a standardized test. Gone is the ability to express free thoughts or articulate a higher level goal for learning than to “get a five.” Proponents of unschooling argue that the output of our education is people unable to operate without strict regimens and parameters. In contrast, an education where students are free to create, find their talents and focus on what they enjoy and our naturally good at creates people who are more confident, creative and entrepreneurial.

So this got me thinking about organizational learning. If 70-80% of an employee’s learning occurs through informal networks and people do learn without a learning intervention, do we really need to put more structure around these informal networks? The corporate side of me wants to put a framework and structure around informal learning. After all, unfocused, misdirected learning is a road to inefficiency – right? Or wrong – is it actually a road to discovery, creativity, and self confidence? Should we unschool our corporate learning and how much do we unschool it?

In business we like to say we give freedom to team members; set them loose to identify creative solutions; “think outside the box.” However, getting outside the box at work has risks associated with it. When you step outside the box you may come against deeply ingrained corporate culture. You risk ridicule, even failure. Is the message people hear more like … think outside the box, but don’t go too far outside the box, at least be anchored to the box?

If I think about applying structure and framework to informal learning, am I really saying to put a box around it, so that everyone feels safe, but little is actually gained? Where do the entrepreneurial ideas come from if people aren’t confident in expressing new ideas or they aren’t free to discover things on their own?

How much structure is the right amount? Is the best thing we can do for informal learning to just get out of the way? What is the best path to effective learning without inhibiting discovery? Considering the drastic shifts we have seen in the economic landscape, perhaps it is time to allow ourselves to step off the assembly line and back in the sandbox, free to imagine and create.

 

Yes, we’re all hearing the buzz. The holy grail of learning is shifting to games/gamification, mobile, and social. Within my team at BLP, we actually are already believers of the value that blending these three things together can have on a learning experience….but we want proof, not just gut feelings about this. So – we invite you to join our newly-created “learning laboratory” at Bottom-Line Performance and be part of a little three-part experiment we’re going to do.

Part 1 coincides with the Professional Football Championship Not to Be Named for Copyright Purposes. Since it’s in Indianapolis this year and so are we, we felt it was a perfect fit. We’re creating a game called Gridiron Guru that targets the casual football fan. If you can already explain how teams score, but you’re clueless or unsure when you hear things like intentional grounding, pass interference, 4-3 defensive formation, nickel defense, etc., then this game should help you learn…while you also have fun and engage with other people who are doing the same thing as you.

We chose a fun theme and approach, but our goal is serious. How well does a social/mobile/gaming approach work in helping people learn…particularly when no one is pushing them to learn? You get to opt into our little experiment – and you only play as far as you want to play. Yeah, we are providing a small incentive (Top 3 scores entered into drawing for $25 App Store card), but there is only ONE winner and, hopefully, lots of learners/players. Let’s see how much learning happens with this format.

Our game begins Monday, January 30th. If you want to play (and we hope you do), start following @thekguru on Twitter. He’ll announce the game’s start and send out the game link on the 30th.  You will need to create an account to play – but you only provide a name and email…and we aren’t adding you to any contact list. This is just for the game. Ideally, you’ll play on your iPad. If you aren’t lucky enough to have an iPad yet, you can play on your desktop. Android is not an option for this little experiment of ours….yet.

Our game ends at kickoff time Sunday, February 5th. We’ll tweet out the winner (as well as posting on the Knowledge Guru game site). We’ll analyze our first round of data and send out the results.

For Part 2 of our experiment, you can expect a college basketball-themed game (in March, of course) that focuses on the game of basketball for the casual college b-ball lover. We’ll deliver Part 3 at the end of April or beginning of May, and focus on the far more serious topic of  effective learning design. We’ll use the Knowledge Guru game engine again for our March game – and then go 100% social at the end of April when we play our learning design game on Twitter.

So – come play with us and learn with us. We’ll share our results after each game – and then results overall. We’ll share what people seem to retain, like, dislike, etc. and how much people learn (our game engine has some wonderful reports we can share!!).

 

 

 

Knowledge Guru is a game engine we at Bottom-Line Performance have been developing for the past year. We’re chomping at the bit to release the game engine to people so they can create their own learning games…but we also want to gather as much test feedback as we can before finalizing the first release.

Knowledge Guru enables you to create a quiz-style, competitive game that provides an engaging way for employees to acquire “declarative knowledge” (e.g. learn the facts and apply those facts to specific scenarios).  The game design deliberately cultivates information retention by repetition. You have to deliver three scrolls related to each game topic to earn topic mastery. You do this by answering questions within each topic. You can’t unlock the Knowledge Guru “grab bag” until you master all the topics. The more you retain, the more points and achievements you earn. Game play is fast – which means employees can play when they have as little as 5 minutes of available time. The gamification of the learning is designed to keep people coming back to play more.

We just completed a closed beta test, and we’re extremely happy with the great feedback we received.  It’s time to open it up and allow a wide array of random testers to play our test game  – and give us additional feedback on the game engine design.

So – now is your chance.  We are opening up Knowledge Guru to an Open Beta where anyone can create an account and join in on the fun – and help shape a great learning tool in the process!

All features will be available to our Open Beta testers: Topic Masteries, Knowledge Guru Status, Social Scoring Leader Boards, Achievements, and even the “Guru Grab Bag” mode can be unlocked by the dedicated learner! To make things even more interesting, we will give away a $25 iTunes gift certificate to the player with the top score on the Global Leader boards when testing ends on Friday, September 23rd.

Keep in mind – the engine’s TEST topic is Wellness. As you play, consider what topics your organization might find useful to create a Knowledge Guru game around, such as procedures, product knowledge, industry knowledge, etc.

For more details and to access the game go to http://www.theknowledgeguru.com and create your free account!

Good luck and have fun becoming a Knowledge Guru™! Then tell us what you think.

I’ve been reading tons of posts lately on “Learning 2.0.” Folks have been talking about “Web 2.0″ since 2004 – it’s taken the learning community until 2009 to get onto the band wagon. The big question everyone is asking is, “How can we use Learning 2.0/Web 2.0 to facilitate informal learning in our organization and enhance the formal stuff we do?” Interesting to me that the question is HOW and not SHOULD WE. (Okay…I know opportunities exist to leverage it – but I think people are trying everything without fully evaluating which options are BEST.)

Thus far, there doesn’t seem to be a huge consensus on what works, though there are lots of folks trying lots of things. One interesting post I came across today detailed a pilot project where a university professor decided to make use of Twitter a requirement for his Shakespeare class. He does a nice job outlining is pilot – and documenting the results he got.

His students were less than impressed by it. One big comment I noted as I reviewed his results was that, for most students, their preference was for Facebook. They weren’t resistant to social media tools for learning – just having to ADD another tool onto one they already used daily.

Any implications for corporate training?

I think so. I’ve long been concerned that we’re so gung-ho on using Learning 2.0 that no one is stopping to ask 1) how much is too much, and 2) what’s most viable and least intrusive to learners. People only have so much time. We want their social learning to be meaningful – not a burden. My biggest sensation after attending the MarchSALT conference was that people are trying everything…and finding that even our digital natives (those in their teens and 20s) aren’t embracing nearly as many tools as folks imagined they would.

I’d love to see a robust discussion of what works and what doesn’t. I’d particularly like to hear from LEARNERS THEMSELVES. That was the power of the Kingston University pilot. They spent a lot of time gathering data from the learners to find out how they perceived Twitter as a learning tool. There’s lots of learning designers who are raving about the potential – but less data from the perspective of learners who have leveraged Web 2.0 as part of a learning experience.

Let’s hear from the learners!

Anyone who is a student of instructional design has heard of Robert Gagne’s nine events of instruction. In fact, when designing a course, most of us make quite sure we incorporate Gagne’s instruction event #2: (inform learners of objectives) right away. In our attempt to follow the rule, we often think less about HOW we share the learning objectives and focus more on simply listing them…in that dreaded bulleted list we introduce with the following words: “After completing this course, learners will…blah blah blah.” UGH.

Why do we do this? What does it really achieve? Gagne says we should inform learners of the objectives to create a level of expectation for the learning. By using a bulleted list, what level of expectation are we setting? What level of learner engagement are we shooting for?

Do learners really need learning objectives?! I think they do, but I wanted to seek out another opinion, so I asked a colleague.

This week, I spoke to Andy McGuire, Director of Global Learning and Development in Corporate Human Resources at Cummins, Inc. Andy is very passionate about learning objectives and has strong opinions about the best ways to present them to learners.

Andy says he was first exposed to the misuse of learning objectives while in the Marine Corps completing electronics training. “Every course I took started with the list of objectives,” he explains. “I didn’t pay attention; no one else did either. It didn’t motivate me to learn; it didn’t get me ready to learn.”

While completing his formal education at Indiana University, he learned just how important learning objectives are, but once he officially started his career in instructional design, he admits he relied on the same approach to presenting learning objectives because “that’s what I thought I was supposed to do.”

That soon stopped.

Andy says we should always include the learning objectives. “They have to be there…for the design team and for the subject matter experts…to be sure they are focused on the content that needs to be there.” But he challenges us to “be creative in how we present them” to learners. He emphasizes that we must show the value of learning objectives and can do so in a variety of ways. Some ideas Andy has used and seen done effectively (for e-learning and instructor-led courses) include:

• Begin an upfront discussion with learners that involves a series of questions about what they know/do currently.
• Paint a scenario for learners that depicts a “real world” situation where specific knowledge/skill is required.
• Identify challenges related to the course topic and have learners use/share their own experiences.

Andy says the point is to get learners to “organize their thoughts” so they are ready to learn.

Once they are ready to learn, you can summarize what you’ve done upfront by sharing the objectives, perhaps as a series of questions, considerations, or even images that distinguish current state from future state!

When it comes to learning objectives, Andy reminds us all to “think about the purpose, not just about the mechanics, of what you’re trying to do.”

I couldn’t agree more.

For more information on effectively presenting learning objectives, Andy and I both recommend Michael Allen’s Guide to e-Learning. Refresh your memory of Robert Gagne’s nine events of instruction by reviewing his book The Conditions of Learning. Both books are available on www.amazon.com.

As a first-time BLP blogger, I was very eager to lock down my e-learning topic and join the ranks of my fellow bloggers. Last week, I determined my three blog topics for the month, all focused on curriculum design and development. I felt good identifying my first topic: designing an e-learning course with little to no content in sight, and then…do you know what happened next? Ironically, I had created the topic and struggled with…the content. I can’t escape!

So, I did what I always do…begin the “content inquisition.”

Don’t get me wrong! I never start designing an e-learning solution from a content-driven approach. My first step is to focus on desired outcomes: what do learners need to know and/or know how to do after completing the course? What should they believe? What will success look like? Will they do their jobs differently, and if so, how?

Once I have the answers to all of these questions, I begin the content discussion. If you want learners to DO this, what content should we share with them? Why? How will THIS content help learners DO that? It is the battle between the “must-include content” and the “nice-to-include content.”

Dr. Ruth Clark wrote about removing the “nice to have” content (and avoiding cognitive overload) in her book, e-Learning and the Science of Instruction and in an article called Design Strategies: Efficiency in e-Learning: Proven Instructional Methods for Faster, Better, Online Learning she co-wrote for the E-Learning Guild’s e-magazine. Although the article is about five years old, it is still one of my all-time faves. Check it out at: http://www.clarktraining.com/content/articles/Guild_E-Learning.pdf

My goal, after the dust settles, is to have a clean, concise list of content that obviously supports the desired course outcomes. Then, the real fun begins…finding this content! The inquisition continues….

1. Can we review any of this content before we finalize the course design?
2. How many different “sources” should we rely on? (Websites, books, existing training, subject matter experts, etc.)?
3. What % of the content exists in a written format and just needs to be inserted “as is” in the program (existing procedure, for instance)?
4. What % of the content exists, but is from existing training, guidance documents or other written sources and needs to be edited and/or repackaged?
5. What % of the content exists, but is not in a written format (i.e., a subject matter expert knows it)?
6. What % of the content needs to be created from scratch and may not need to be discussed and agreed upon prior to “releasing” for use in the program?

If the majority of the content is already available and easily accessible, I feel really good about finalizing the design with the help of a content map. If I can map the existing content to the course objectives, I’ll have a clearer vision of the course overall course structure, length, and types of learner interactions. I can also easily identify content gaps and “nice-to-have content” that might try and sneak into my design!

If the majority of the content does NOT exist, I recommend incorporating a content gathering step into the design phase of the project. I’ve learned that a more robust design leads to an easier and more successful development phase on an e-learning project.

So…how do you create a solid e-learning course design when the content you need to support the course objectives is…mysterious?