Cooking analogies have been used to describe blended learning. Instructional designers looking at blended learning through a chef’s eyes might see  a “recipe” of sorts where you put ingredients together using a process. Or, you could look at blended learning from the learner’s point of view as buffet where you pick out what you want from a variety of food. My mentor/colleague Gary Woodill introduced me to the cooking analogy at a newbie elearning workshop we were doing. It is a good one.

However, I can’t help but think that when you actually mix ingredients while cooking the result is usually something that can’t really be “unblended” (although you could pick raisins out of an oatmeal cookie for example). But blended learning and quilting…that to me might be a better analogy, especially when talking about where social networks fit in. I like this definition of blended learning:

“Blended learning is a combination of learning objectives and learning modalities that are strategically combined to achieve a training program’s expected learning outcomes.” -Miner and Hofman, 2009

I hadn’t thought about the analogy between quilting and design of instruction until recently when I found some old quilting projects in need of attention. I share my love of the hobby with the Amish:

Amish quilts continue to be a source of inspiration to quilters. Modern quilt artists are using black with solid colors and discovering the beauty in such basic designs. Amish quilt designs are a result of a belief that art is not a separate thing but that beauty is a part of function, a concept that can be an inspiration to all quilters. – womenfolk.com.

When I design a quilt, I think in terms of its 3-dimensions. A quilt, of course, is made up of three layers (top, batting, backing) assembled by tying, machine sewing, or hand-stitching the three layers together. The top most layer is normally decorative; using an infinite amount of colors, techniques, and patterns. It can be taken apart and rearranged (with some effort but not as much as, say, a pie). The top layer is content. The batting is what makes it a quilt. Perhaps that can be viewed as the human element of learning. The backing is the underside of the quilt. Perhaps that can be the overall learning objective.

You have commercially-made quilts that you can buy somewhere like JC Penney. They are all the same. They are quilted with a machine, not by hand. This is the equivalent of off-the-shelf courseware.

You have template-type quilts with standard patterns from over the years. The can be very detailed or not. You can sew them my hand, machine stitch them, or even tie them (rapid). These are courses you make with template-based authoring tools.

Then you have custom quilts. One-of-a-kind art quilts. Custom content. Entered into award contests.

The picture below is a crazy quilt. No two are alike. They look haphazard. Random pieces are joined by elaborate stitching.

Historically the pieces were a frugal way to use old fabric. Your fabric, each with a memory. Schema. This is what blended learning today might look like with today’s social learning focus. I think what’s especially interesting is that crazy quilts normally don’t have batting. And, if the batting represents the human connection to content and objectives, perhaps our approach to social learning should be letting people take the random pieces of their lifetime and sew them together as they see fit …crazy talk I know.

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.” ~J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Chapter 22, spoken by the character Holden Caulfield, via quotegarden.com

I watched Jon Meacham, Editor of Newsweek, on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart last week. Meacham had learned earlier that same day that Newsweek is being sold. He described the decision as a “rational economic decision” (based on journalism today). I applaud him for being there. I would have been curled up in the fetal position with a bag of Cheeto’s.

“Who is going to be doing the reporting?” Jon Stewart asked. “If we’re all aggregators, if we’re all commenting, if we’re all analyzing, who exactly is going to be doing the reporting?”

Hmmm. This might as well be a question asked at some “social learning” session within the “emerging” track at a national conference that is rich in sessions about traditional training (“dino” track ; ) It’s the same conference where there’s one person tweeting for each 100 attendees and there’s often no wireless. The one where you use a #hashtag so you can go back and link to the stream to illustrate how lame it was.

Anyway, Meacham made this statement which has generated some critical commentary:

“I do not believe that Newsweek is the only catcher in the rye between democracy and ignorance, but I think we’re one of them. And I don’t think there are that many on the edge of that cliff.”

From Peter Wehner at Commentary Magazine:

“We still need journalists reporting on oil wells that explode and leak, British elections being held, wars being fought, genocide unfolding, riots occurring in Greece, and all the rest. The good news is that we live in a world that features both “hard news” and informed commentary, to a degree we have never had before.

In that respect, what we have today is a vast improvement over the past.”

Ethan Epstein at True/Slant in Journalists Try To Hold Democracy Hostage also wrote about the Meacham interview.

“Meacham is, of course, wrong on the facts. There are now more catchers in the rye than ever before. Paradoxically, the same forces that are killing Newsweek are responsible for a blossoming of scores of specialized news outlets. Newsweek has to die so democracy and journalism can live. Simply put, it is the fact that web publishing is so cheap that has both killed Newsweek, and allowed all forms of niche publications to thrive. (The kind of publications, it should be noted, that never would have made it in an era when you needed deep pockets to produce news.)”

Meacham, when responding to a question from Stewart, points to The Economist as being successful today. He doesn’t give his opinion why. Mine would be that The Economist is (and  has been) a meritocracy. And that’s the nature of the social web.

The Economist is different from other publications not only because it offers a broad international perspective but also because it has no bylines. It is written anonymously, because it is a paper whose collective voice and personality matter more than the identities of individual journalists. This ensures a continuity of tradition and view which few other publications have matched.

Or, is it Vanity Fair’s, Matt Pressman’s take?

The Economist is like that exotic coffee that comes from beans that have been eaten and shat out undigested by an Indonesian civet cat, and Time and Newsweek are like Starbucks—millions of people enjoy them, but it’s not a point of pride. Reading The Economist or drinking cat-poop coffee shouldn’t be either, but as the quirky lead sentence of an Economist article might say, “Human beings are peculiar in many ways.”

At some point here, the Newsweek’s of the traditional training content world need to “get” the social web. It’s about human beings. Or is that too elitist? Too cat poop coffee? Is the clusterfuck around social learning a naïve view of learning or are the staunch protectors of traditional training taking a naïve view of learning?

BTW…this is where The Economist was over three years ago.

Andrew McAfee, who literally wrote the book on Enterprise 2.0,  delivered the keynote address on the first day of the E-Learning Guild’s DevLearn 09 conference.

You say “social,” McAfee said, and the CXO will think this…

Enterprise 2.0 makes clear that the new technologies are good for much more than just socializing-when properly applied, they help businesses solve pressing problems, capture dispersed and fast-changing knowledge, highlight and leverage expertise, generate and refine ideas, and harness the wisdom of crowds. (from the book)

So  for the C-suite cut the social terminology. Talk about what problem you’re trying to fix (open communication channels, connecting cross-functional groups, project management, on-the-job support, matching experts, reducing redundancy, knowledge management).

I think this is spot on and, BONUS, it seems to ironically fit my persona : )

photo: http://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/

Just finished up an online presentation, Using Social Medial to Improve Workplace Learning, slides below. I had uploaded my slides an hour early and took care of all the necessary details – shut off cell phone and house phone, banished children from my immediate area, let the dog out, shut the windows, and…special bonus this week…asked my contractor not to run the power saw or pound sheet rock from 1-2 pm. I forgot to tell him the part about me needing electricity and, of course, at 12:55 I lost power. I asked him “calmly” to put it back on and was presenting by 1:02 with a light sweat. Anyway, it went pretty good in my opinion (which doesn’t mean jack.)

At the end of the presentation, I tried something different and shared Wordle so we could make a word cloud for two issues: what things make a bad  classroom training session and what an ideal online community would look like. I gathered up text from the chat box. This one is for “bad things.”

and this one “ideal online community”:

Couple of additional notes from the presentation:

• Most of us reported a dramatic change in the way we communicate, collaborate, and interact at work over the last 10 years.
• 2/3’s didn’t have a strategy for social media
• Most of us reported moderate usage social media

Some quotes and talking points:

“Social learning technologies must be seen as the medium for relationship creation, not information exchange.” (Digenti, 2000)

“Learning is an integral and inseparable aspect of social practice.” (Lave & Wenger, 1991)

“We are moving toward a knowledge-era model of education with large-scale social networks involving complex communities and individual identify construction.” (Wenger, 2004)

“Social learning technologies can bring together and bridge the gap between training and knowledge management – linking knowledge and acquisition, development, and learning. A strong collaboration platform links continued knowledge acquisition, development, and learning.” (Bruck, 2007)

“It is within complex online communities and networks where social construction of understanding occurs.” (Huberman, Romero, & Fang, 2008)

References (because, ya know, I’m a researcher ; )

Bruck, P. (2008) Welcome and introduction to microlearning and capacity building. Microlearning and Capacity Building. Proceedings of the 4th International Microlearning 2008 Conference. Innsbruck, Austria.

Digenti, D. (2000). Make Space for Informal Learning. ASTD Learning Circuits.

Huberman, B.A., Romero, D.M. & Fang, W. (2008). Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope. Social Computing Lab, HP Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA and Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.

Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. (You must buy this book!)

Wenger, E. (2006). Learning for a small planet: a research agenda. Scientific project description.

Here are slides from the presentation I did yesterday. The session was hosted by SumTotal Systems.

Some notes:
Polls:

• Most attending work in L&D with some HR, IT, and learning services providers
• Most attending work in organization with 2000+ ee’s but several were SMBs (under 2K ee’s for this presentation)
• Current learning delivery channels primarily ILT classroom and ILT online as well as a fair amount of self-paced e-learning.
• Very few people work with fellow employees at one physical location. Nearly everyone dispersed.
• Goals pretty evenly spread among rapid e-learning (consumption and development), reduce costs, support informal learning, improve productivity.

Other notes:

• Definition of social media vary among attendees (~160)
• I used Urban Dictionary definition as of yesterday…and to illustrate a participatory online dictionary (which, BTW, is often NSFW but a heck of a lot of fun in my opinion).
• Noted main difference between main stream media and social media. Social media enables everyone to publish/access info inexpensively.
• Information from Microsoft SMB insight report (increase SaaS, investment in tech)
• Challenges to SMBs:  resources, culture, loss of control of information, fear of loss of productivity/abuse, security
• Benefits to SMBs: faster response, resilient, lower costs without sacrificing learning, increased productivity, supplements other training

Where we are today:

• Primary forms of social learning technologies used in corporations today appear to be e-mail, live online learning (Web conferencing), threaded discussion, and collaborative content development.
• Organizations are just beginning to use social media technologies and few are using the social learning technologies available in their LMSs.
• For services outside the firewall, blockage continues to be an issue driven by such barriers as organizational culture, bandwidth limitations, security issues, IT resistance, and lack of resources.
• Most learning professionals view social media as valuable to learners, and usage is growing.
• Employers are still are having trouble implementing collaborative solutions; hard to find support in the corporate environment.
• IT and senior leadership buy-in can be particularly difficult perhaps because it’s easy to find evidence of abuse that can undermine implementing social learning technologies. Social media, in general, is misunderstood in many organizations.
• More and more, learning management system companies are seeing the need to expand their solutions beyond a learning environment where classes and courses are the center of activity.
• Shared a diagram: team collaboration, increased personal productivity, community building (the ‘why’)
• Need to become experts on organizational communities

Reviewed:

• Social networking services (corporate learning applications):  To identify experts on a topic – most “knowledge” exists in the heads of employees; To reduce the time to find connections and answers to questions; extend relationships beyond traditional classroom instruction and e-learning courses
• Blogs (corporate learning applications): knowledge management tool, source of information, group project management tool, professional development,  support service, method for obtaining feedback, project management,  builds writing skills,  networking by having conversations with others, capture the knowledge of experts.
• Wikis – most versatile; can build just about anything on it. (ideas for starting out): give people something to do there, a reason to visit (build around the work), obtain management support, plan for change management if the culture is being changed., provide up-front training/coaching, maintain content, allow for emergence during growth/maintenance, involve a broad cross-section of people, consider templates for consistency, identify super-workers/techies to pilot wikis, seek feedback/evaluate.
• Microblogging:> Pros: real-time messages help learners feel more like a community, questions get answered fast, it is good for providing immediate feedback, ability to communicate primarily using cell phones, can mass message a specific group, can provide a ‘backchannel’ to ILT for learners to participate, limited characters are good for summarizing (metacognition), public record exists of messages.
  Cons: A cost may be associated with receiving text messages via cell phone, not for everyone because it can be intrusive, productivity can suffer, the informal nature makes it hard to quantify,self-directed, self-motivated groups tend to define their own enterprise and may drift from organizational objectives, fFree transfer of information typical of social learning technologies may create problems in an environment that treats information as private, a public record exists of messages ; )
• Tagging/Bookmarking – described how they worked; relatively low adoption but may increase as more LMSs include
• Presence – Some ways to use presence tools to enhance education: Allow learners to reveal (or conceal) their presence both synchronously and asynchronously. Provide both push and pull forms of notification. Provide a way to filter information. Provide cooperative learning support with encouragement to cooperate.Use a referral system to show successful learning networks.Link a resource to the learner (the system captures profile information).Introduce learners to each other.Provide help. Document and share: learners should be actively creating rather than consuming knowledge.

Asked: Do you have a strategy for social media for learning? Majority “NO” (supports our prior surveys). Noted we don’t get much $$ without strategy.

Strategies:

• As part of a blended learning strategy
• To provide a community for learning professionals
• To provide a collaborative learning environment among cross-functional groups
• For knowledge management
• As part of a learning plan
• To create a place for informal learning
• For leadership development
• For professional development
• To develop and retain talent

Good use case:

• distributed workforce
• information/knowledge workers
• need for peer-to-peer collaboration
• need easy/anywhere access to information
• need access to SMEs
• supportive culture

Action Plan

1. Start small. Find opportunities where social learning technologies will foster learning.
2. Become an expert on the learners within your organization’s communities.
3. YOU need to use the tools yourself. Connect with someone right now.
4. Develop a strategy.
5. Incorporate into daily work. Make it part of ‘real work.’

Ending message: If you don’t have a supportive culture of openness and sharing you are screwed. Need to do the work there first.

References / Resources Used (additional to those linked to above):

SumTotal, Harnessing the Power of Informal Learning Technology, White Paper

Jeff Whitney, Outstart (Interview, strategy)

Bryan Chapman, Chapman Alliance (Learning Model, SMB)

Alonso, F., Lopez, G., Manrique, D. & Vines, J.M. (2005). An instructional model for Web-based e-learning education with a blended learning process approach. British Journal of Educational Technology, Vol. 36, No. 2, 2005, pp. 217-235.

Anderson, T. (2005). Distance learning—Social software’s killer ap? 17th Biennial Conference of the Open and Distance Learning Association of Australia, 2005.

Aragon, S.R. (2003). Creating Social Presence in Online Environments, New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2003), p. 57–68 in Duvall, J. (2007)

Text Messaging to Improve Social Presence in Online Learning. Educause Quarterly.

Arhin, A. & Cormier, E. (2007). Using Deconstruction to Educate Generation Y Nursing Students. Journal of Nursing Education 46 no12 562-7 D 2007.

Baird, D.E. & Fisher, M. 2005-2006. Neomillennial User Experience Design Strategies: Utilizing Social Networking Media to Support “Always On” Learning Styles. J. Educational Technology Systems, Vol. 34 (1) 5-32, 2005-2006.

Braly, M. & Froh, G. (2006). Social bookmarking in the enterprise. Digital Library of Information Science and Technology.

Bruck, B. & Schneider, P. (2007). Blended Learning: A Solution to Proficiency, in Clarey, J., The Real Story: Blended Learning: Bridging research and practice. Brandon Hall Research.

Chapman, B. et al (2008). LMS KnowledgeBase. Brandon Hall Research Online Database.

Clarey, J. (2007). The Real Story: Blended Learning: Bridging research and practice. Brandon Hall Research.

Digenti, D. (2000). Make Space for Informal Learning. ASTD Learning Circuits.

Drugge, M. (2004). Wearable Computer Interaction Issues in Mediated Human to Human Communication. Division of Media Technology Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, Luleå University of Technology, Luleå, Sweden.

Duvall, J. (2007). Text Messaging to Improve Social Presence in Online Learning. Educause Quarterly.

Edwards, P. (2007). Managing Wikis In Business. MBA Technology Management Programme (paper).

Garrison, R., Anderson, T. & Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education. The Internet and Higher Education, 2 (2-3), pp.87-105 in Anderson, T. (2005).

Distance Learning – Social software’s killer ap? 17th Biennial Conference of the Open and Distance Learning Association of Australia, 2005.

Good, R. (September 27, 2004). “3D Virtual Spaces for Learning And Collaboration.” Message posted to MasterNewMedia. Retrieved April 24, 2007

Jones, J. & Royer, M. (2007). Life Science Informatics Trends Analysis for Community College Program Builders. Volume 3: Virtual Worlds. Bellevue Community College. Forsyth Technical Community College grantee, The National Center for Biotechnology Workforce, funded by U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration / President’s High Growth Jobs Training Initiative.

McKerlich, R. (2007). Virtual Worlds for Learning: An Analysis in the Use of Immersive Environments for Training. Brandon Hall Research.

McKerlich, R. (2007). Virtual Worlds for Learning: An Analysis of Eight Immersive Learning Platforms. Brandon Hall Research.

Nardi, B., Whittaker, S. & Schwarz, H. (2000). It’s Not What You Know, It’s Who You Know: Work in the Information Age. First Monday. Retrieved March 25, 2008

Oblinger, D. & Oblinger, J. (2005). Educating the Net Generation. EDUCAUSE.

Prinsen, F., Volman, L., & Terwel, J. (2007). The influence of learner characteristics on degree and type of participation in a CSCL environment. British Journal of Educational Technology 38 no6 1027-55 N 2007.

Rosen, C. (2007). Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism. The New Atlantis. Summer 2007.

Shirky, C. (2008). Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Penguin Press.

Singh, H. (2003). Building Effective Blended Learning Programs. Educational Technology, Volume 43, Number 6, Pages 51-54

Werner, T. & Vipond, S. (2005). Linking Training to the Business Goals: In-Depth Descriptions of How IBM, Toyota, and Others Earn Executive Support for Training. Brandon Hall Research.

Woodill, G. (2007). Emerging E-Learning Technologies: Tools for Developing Innovative Online Training. Brandon Hall Research.

Young, J. R. (2008). Forget E-Mail: New Messaging Service Has Students and Professors Atwitter. The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Other:
Social Learning: Pedagogy for the Connected Age, Alec Courosa
How to Save Newspaper Companies, Jake Ludington
What is Social Media, Robert Scoble
My Web 2.0 Expo Keynote: until Best Buy adds people to its website our jobs are not done, Robert Scoble
Social Media for Corporate Learning?, Jeanne Meister
Twitter in Education, Clif Mims

Continuing on with the Friday series that – each week – features an LMS that kicks ass, I’m pleased to feature Meridian KSI. I spoke with Roy Haythorn, Vice President of Operations for Meridian Knowledge Solutions, LLC. Let’s find out what’s new at Meridian KSI.

Q: Hi Roy. I know you’ve been incorporating some social media tools into your LMS. What is Meridian KSI doing with social media?

A: Roy Haythorn – Online communities and blogs are two of the biggest social media tools that Meridian has made a part of its LMS. One of our customers, which serves a statewide audience of K-12 educators has used our LMS to teach grade-school teachers how to be better instructors. To do that, they’ve set up more than 134 online community rooms in our LMS. Science teachers from across the state will, for instance, create and use a community room as part of an online or face-to-face course they’ve taken. At last count, I think 30,000 teachers had access to the system. The size of the online community rooms range from two people to an entire school district. It’s great stuff, and it brings teachers together on their own schedule to swap what works and what doesn’t, or just reinforce what they’ve learned.

Q: What drove your decision to incorporate social media tools into your LMS?

A: Roy Haythorn – We’re careful watchers of the marketplace. We watch trends; we have a lot of technophiles on the team who play with the latest tools. Some of these tools make sense for our customers, others are simply interesting. When social media tools caught our attention, we asked: How can we make use of this stuff with LMS technology in order to push the evolution of learning? That said, there are a lot of products, features and functions coming into the LMS market that, honestly, have no value to a learning and development pro. Instead, we take a “learning-first” approach to LMS development. And by that I mean every new technology Meridian looks at has to promise real value for training and development, or we don’t waste R&D dollars on it.

Q: It’s the time of year for predictions. If you could predict what LMSs will look like in three years, what do you see?

A: Roy Haythorn -  No guarantee it’ll happen in three years, but I’d like to see all LMSs tightly integrated with portals. That way, users can grab pieces of LMS functionality, such as ROI for learning, from their portal while the LMS simply operates in the background. In other words, end users have no idea they’re even using an LMS. People won’t have to sign on to an LMS in the future and stay within that system to do their learning. Instead, the LMS will be launched by way of a portal, and users will interact with the LMS from other applications.

Q: Do you have any examples of your vision?

A: Roy Haythorn -  One example would be a plant manager tapping a materials planning tool inside SAP or Oracle. Once there, he finds he doesn’t remember how to run the program. So he clicks on a link that’s labeled “Learn More,” and from behind the scenes the LMS launches a three-minute course on the topic via a simulation.

Or, perhaps, an engineer is performing a safety audit. As she’s performing the audit, she demonstrates her proficiency and it is tracked by the LMS via her hand-held device, which then delivers an online assessment. Depending on how she does on the test, the LMS either records a passing grade or prescribes learning for a gap in her skill.

Q: Are you seeing any difficulties in the incorporation of social media among your current customers/potential customers?

A: Roy Haythorn – These tools aren’t always used to the fullest by our customers. Frankly, some buyers fear that social software makes it more difficult to communicate, not less. They see social software as the purview of co-eds, gamers and nerds. Many potential buyers balk at the value of exchanging know-how in this way. In fact, they believe social software makes controlling a message or providing a consistent set of instructions impossible. They may believe the flood gates of information will open if you give everyone in a company an equal voice. When you look at tools like Facebook, Twitter, Yammer and an array of other social networking software for exchanging know-how, our challenge is to prove the success that businesspeople are having with these and other social networking tools. And, if we do that, then we’ll pique the interest of customers.

Thanks Roy, well said. I especially can relate to your last answer. It seems one of the greatest barriers we face today in the L&D field is change management.

Readers, feel free to ask Roy any questions you may have.

Prior LMSs in series:
Cornerstone OnDemand
Generation21
GeoLearning

(Meridian KSI was a sponsor at our IiL08 conference in September)

Of all commercial LMSs, I probably have the most hands-on experience with GeoLearning’s various products and services having managed an enterprise implementation several years ago. It was a multi-phase implementation (LMS, LCMS, Talent Management) that went off pretty smooth and the team at GeoLearning was great to work with. I found them very responsive even when I was a giant pain in the ass. I’ve been to their beautiful home office in West Des Moines, Iowa but didn’t get a chance to meet Will Hipwell who is GeoLearning’s Senior Vice President, Marketing & Product Management at that time although I’ve communicated with him by email many, many times. (I will always think of Will as “Super Will” because of my ’super’ phase after watching ‘Superbad’ the movie and the super way that he picked up on that in our correspondence).

Anyway, GeoLearning’s LMS is pretty super too (AWESOME transition, huh?). Actually, it kick’s some ass and I talked to Will about that. Continuing my series of email interviews about LMSs that are doing innovative things with social media, here’s the scoop on what GeoLearning is up to.

Q: What social media tools is GeoLearning incorporating into their LMS?

A: Will Hipwell- GeoLearning’s GeoEngage module facilitates Communities of Practice (CoPs), enables social networking, and provides access to Web 2.0 technologies like Chat, instant messaging, email, file sharing and uploading, resource library, blogging, wikis, discussion groups and RSS feeds. These are all integrated with our LMS platform so that informal learning can still be tracked, managed and measured as easily as more formal training programs. Clients like Cabela’s and Computer Associates are using these tools to great success because they enable learning to occur with the flexibility and at the speed their marketplaces require.

Q: What drove your decision to incorporate social media tools into your LMS?

A:  Will Hipwell- On-demand learning is critical to an organization’s overall learning strategy success. The extremely brisk pace at which job roles, individual responsibilities, the marketplace and even whole companies change and evolve make is absolutely necessary that learners can access just-in-time resources. Organizations and employees can no longer wait for the planning, creation and rollout of formal training programs. The world just moves too fast. To be successful, companies must be able to incorporate on-demand learning opportunities, just-in-time training, on-the-job-training, as well as the technologies that enable informal learning like blogs, wikis and instant messaging. In this “free market of learning”—just like the free market economy—learners (consumers) will find the best solutions to their learning and development challenges.

Q: If you could predict what LMSs will look like in three years, what do you see?

A: Will Hipwell: Over time the LMS will increase the number of touch-points it has within an organization but at the same time become increasingly invisible to those who use it. The LMS will become more of a behind-the-scenes application that won’t require you to login or explicitly go to access or attend a learning event. It will become more seamlessly integrated with the workplace and will  be increasingly accessible via mobile device, and even recommend different learning activities based upon just-in-time experiences and the context of a challenge or need faced while on the job.

For example, a call center employee might access just-in-time tips for dealing with a customer call on the same screen where the interaction is taking place. The interaction can be tracked as both a successfully closed customer interaction (a business metric), as well as a learning opportunity that becomes part of the individual’s overall training record (and associated LMS data point). In this type of situation, informal learning, Web 2.0 and social networking tools become more and more valuable.

Q: What difficulties are you seeing in the incorporation of social media among your current customers/potential customers?

A: Will Hipwell - In some cases, clients and prospective clients are either unaware of what 2.0 technologies and/or are not entirely sure how they can be practically implemented in the workplace and provide value. Another barrier is the perception that collaboration tools with “silly names” like blogs and wikis can be time-wasters, or they are associated with people wasting time on Facebook or MySpace.

Me: Thanks Super Will. That time-waster barrier is a huge one. It’s kind of frustrating – not seeing the collaboration but seeing the “silly named” tool. (I wonder if that’s because it’s sometimes pitched to management that way?) BTW readers…I’ve attached a nice checklist on collaboration and blended learning requirements that Will sent along. Enjoy!
GeoLearning’s collaboration-and-blended-learning-requirements-checklist

Prior LMSs in series:
Cornerstone OnDemand
Generation21

My personal goal at Brandon Hall Research is to provide information people need to make good choices. Information like what learning technologies and tools to buy, how to implement them, best practices, how to develop a strategy, and the identification of trends in the industry.

I try to accomplish that through many delivery channels (KnowledgeBases, published reports, Webinars, conferences, workshops, blogs, email, Skype, Twitter, Facebook, social networks, experiments, etc.)

My newest product is about social learning technologies and LMSs.

Over the years I’ve followed LMSs as they morphed from administrative tools – learners and learning events are tracked, e-learning is served up, and reports are generated – to systems that incorporate the entire talent management life cycle (hire-to-retire) and now, for many systems, toward more integration of social learning technologies. Many do so much more than “manage learning”  it’s hardly fair to call them just an LMS.

The research I do here at Brandon Hall Research has morphed too. So, I’m pumped to launch this new product in a printable format and as a service, on an interactive website. I’m very much looking forward to having more personal communication with Brandon Hall Research library members and clients.