My eating habits are a giveaway that I’ve returned for another semester of classes at SU. The contents of my minivan tell part of the story…Mc (killing-me-one-dollar-at-a-time) Donald’s wrappers, Starbucks cups, and empty Diet Pepsi bottles litter the floor. I’m a messy, over-caffeinated student.

There’s also the debris associated with being a messy Mom – various mismatched kids socks, miscellaneous sports equipment (some out of season), water bottles, junk mail, half-empty sports drinks, school papers, receipts, DVDs, and cords galore. As you can imagine I’m in the running for the “Not Mother of the Year” award.

My home office is in a similar state. The five of us that make up the Clarey family are set up temporarily in a rental house while we wait to close on our new house after selling our prior home over a month ago. Chaos! And look at that wallpaper (photo below)!

What does this have to do with corporate training? I’m so glad you asked!

Look around your desk. Chaos? Can you relate? Are you a messy learning professional? If so, I salute your discarded binders, old books, dusty magnets, coffee & soda cups, half-finished courses, and other signs of chaos. Share your messy self! Send me a photo and/or inventory. The best mess gets some Brandon Hall Research swag. That, and my sincere gratitude for making me feel like less of a slob.

When moving around at a large organization, things are boxed, unconnected and reconnected for you. You can practically go get some coffee and come back and IT will have you back in business.

While moving my home office from my house to temp living space this week, I looked around at one desktop PC, two laptops, a wireless printer/scanner/fax machine, three VoiP lines, a wireless modem, some routers, a box ‘o gadgets, and a box ‘o cords and sighed.

Because I had to wait for my cable company to hook up my cable sometime between 8-12 AM one week from when I called, my office was the last thing to go at my house. So it was back and forth between the two places, a couple of nights in a sleeping bag due to the lack of furniture. (advice for the stupid: most women of a certain age should not sleep in sleeping bags on hardwood floors, even if she has lots of ‘padding.’)

Once the cable company showed up, I was up and running in a few hours at the new place. Yup, I went out for coffee and my IT support crew (that would be Andy, my husband) had the entire network up and running.

Cartoon by Dave Walker.

How many times have you heard (or said, or thought) that?

I’m saying it to myself right now. See, I am in the process of moving. The last time I moved was 1999. We had a 60-day lapse in between closings on our homes back then and had to go into a rental. That involves moving twice in the course of two months.

I’m doing it again. This time with a 6-week lapse. A family of five & a household with eight years worth of ’stuff.’ I’m asking myself why.

Not WHY in the ‘Sponge-Bob Squarepants to Patrick Starfish-way (the one when their balloon bursts) but WHY in the ‘Tom Hanks-to-Wilson the Volleyball-way (when their sail breaks off their homemade lifeboat). You know, I DON’T KNOW WHY!!!

Please tell me you do that too. Exhausted, do you look at yourself in the mirror and say WHY? It’s amusing because it’s mostly done after you’ve already done whatever it is you’ve always done stupidly. “Why didn’t I just…Why do I always…WHY?

Here’s an old story I’m sure you’ve read before…(via businessballs.com)

Apparently this is based on a true incident. A quality management consultant was visiting a small and somewhat antiquated English manufacturing company, to advise on improving general operating efficiency. The advisor was reviewing a particular daily report which dealt with aspects of productivity, absentee rates, machine failure, down-time, etc. The report was completed manually onto a photocopied proforma that was several generations away from the original master-copy, so its headings and descriptions were quite difficult to understand. The photocopied forms were particularly fuzzy at the top-right corner, where a small box had a heading that was not clear at all. The advisor was interested to note that the figure ‘0′ had been written in every daily report for the past year. On questioning the members of staff who completed the report, they told him that they always put a zero in that box, and when he asked them why they looked at each other blankly. “Hmmm.., I’m not sure about that,” they each said, “I guess we’ve just always done it that way.”

Intrigued, the consultant visited the archives to see if he could find a clearer form, to discover what was originally being reported and whether it actually held any significance. When he found the old reports, he saw that the zero return had continued uninterrupted for as far back as the records extended – at least the past thirty years – but none of the forms was any clearer than those presently in use. A little frustrated, he packed away the old papers and turned to leave the room, but something caught his eye. In another box he noticed a folder, promisingly titled ‘master forms’. Sure enough inside it he found the original daily report proforma master-copy, in pristine condition. In the top right corner was the mysterious box, with the heading clearly shown …… ‘Number of Air Raids Today’.

Yup. Patterns are a scary thing.

Make two columns and keep track of your patterns over the next week. Label one side ‘innovative’ and one side ’stupid’ and see if you can break some unproductive, recurring, unoriginal habits. I’m going to give it a go.

The United States is one of the most litigious nations in the world. There is something like 3-4 lawyers for every 1000 people. You can’t turn on daytime television without getting slammed with lawyer ads. I’m not badmouthing lawyers. I do have some very good friends that are very good lawyers (and thank goodness for that!).

In my experience, lawyers got involved in e-learning primarily to approve contracts for outsourced products and services. That changed when I was handed a subpoena to provide details on training practices and the training of a particular employee. The employee’s handling of a particular business transaction was being questioned and in turn, the lawyers wanted to know if the person was (properly) trained. They wanted the training history for the employee and all the training content. This was several years ago – pre-LMS.

Sometimes, requests for copious amounts of information – business processes, technical manuals, and even training materials is enough to force a settlement but still, packing up the old training binders was crucial, legally enforceable, and driven by a tight timeline. So since that first time several years ago, I “dropped everything” and packed up boxes of tutorials, manuals, and books for several such lawsuits. Thankfully, the issue of proper training was never an issue. It never came down to that.

E-learning created a particular challenge because the subpoena demanded content for the time period before the alleged error that was the subject of the lawsuit. It was hard enough finding the right edition dates for print materials but how did I know there had been no changes to the e-learning? Could I say, under oath, that there were no changes? Could you?

I think we talk a lot about how easy it is to update e-learning content and how we can reuse content but I’m not sure we talk about preservation as much as we should. Many organizations have digital document control procedures that include e-learning content. If you don’t here are some suggestions:

• Include e-learning preservation in your learning governance
• Research legal compliance for your jurisdiction(s), i.e., how long should you keep materials and in what form?
• Determine what capabilities your learning technology infrastructure has for tracking changes in content
• Develop a process for handling content changes and determine accountability at each step in the process
• Address security – who can make changes, who has access, etc.
• Include custom e-learning content whether internally or externally produced and third-party off-the-shelf content
• Address standards and specifications – this includes version handling and review and updates of metadata

I would love to start a conversation with organizations who have effective e-learning perservation processes in place. I suspect heavily regulated industries and the government have had such procedures in place for some time. We haven’t yet tackled what training materials include….how does one handle social networks, blogs, wikis, etc.? Yikes, I think I need some legal advice.

Photographer: Mikael Damkier

I’m kind of a widget nut. A widget, if you don’t know, is a third party item that can be embedded in a web page. So on this blog, the pictures of all the gorgeous people on the right (you know who you are) is an Explode social networking widget where I’ve met many education bloggers (and keep it there so you can meet some too) and the Facebook logo is a widget (actually called a ‘blog badge’ on Facebook) where you can link to my profile and befriend me or others if you choose. I’m sure there are some widgets and plugins that drive people nuts. For instance I recently disabled the Snap plugin because I didn’t think it provided value to readers of this blog (it created little clouds next to links).

Anyway, I ran across Clive’s post this morning about “unresolved communication” on blogs. This is when you leave a comment but don’t receive follow-up…you have to remember to go back and read the post to see if there are additional comments and who the heck has time (or memory) to do that? One alternative is to respond to someone via email if you’re notified of posts via email. I’ve done that but it’s not ideal if you wish to keep the conversation going within your blog and perhaps entice others to contribute.

Another alternative is the Subscribe to Comments plugin. Although plugins are not widgets I think they provide a function that is similar and useful. It allows you to subscribe to subsequent comments on a blog entry you’ve made. Here’s a link for the WordPress plugin. I don’t know about other platforms but welcome input and other comments on how you keep track of further comments on a blog.

A visual collage of a pre-vacation state of mind (and state of organization).

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3