I laughed out loud at this video. I am sure I have done this to some courses I’ve developed. I’ve certainly received slide decks from SMEs that are similar to the final design of the package.

p.s. This is an old internal video created by Microsoft’s own packaging team as a humorous look at branding and packaging issues for marketers.

via MacRumors

My colleague Paul and I wrote an article for the Learning Solutions Magazine about building a community of practice at our company. Here’s a summary:

In this article, the authors, members of the Global Learning and Development team at Bechtel, a global engineering and construction firm, give a detailed account of building an online community of practice geared to help field professionals share knowledge and insights gained at the project sites with each other. A key point they attempt to make in this article is that with the right game plan, it IS possible to start and nurture informal learning communities even in organizations where management has not explicitly embraced the value of social learning and networking.

Find the full article here. (eLearning Guild membership required.)

Now wouldn’t it be fun to summarize every piece of content we consume in to six word summaries.  Or how about starting with summarizing all the content you create…online courses, white papers, even e-mails? It also might be interesting to ask each learner to create their own summaries of each courses and posting them for all learners to see.

My colleague Paul Drexler, a man of many many talents, has been working on improving some eLearning courses and shared some sage advice from Orwell via e-mail.

“I’ve been struggling to organize my thoughts on making these courses better.  This morning an essay came to me which brilliantly describes and sums up some of these thoughts.  I refer to Politics and the English Language, an essay by George Orwell, author of Animal Farm and 1984.  I read this my college Freshman year and it made a deep and lasting impression.  If we followed Orwell’s suggestions alone we would greatly improve our courses.”

If you want just  the take away points, read Orwell’s summary below:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

p.s. We made the video in a hurry so some details are missing from the video or are incorrect.

1. Jeremiah Owyang Keynote slides are here: http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2011/06/21/slides-developing-a-learning-strategy-for-mobile-and-social-keynote/ (And my last name isn’t Johnson, so I shouldnt comment on someone’s last name.)

2. A brilliant young chap by the name of John Park co-presented with Alison Rossett.  http://www.elearningguild.com/mLearnCon/concurrent-sessions/session-details.cfm?session=2430Link to their presentation here: http://www.johnjpark.com/mlearning/MLC11_505_ROSSETTPARK.pdf

3. NexLearn doesn’t just sell SimWriter but they build custom sims. And Brandon Andrews, the presenter at the session I attended is THE expert to learn how to write simulations from.

I encourage all my designer colleagues to give this podcast a listen (click here)! Not only is the content excellent but the podcast uses humor so well to make its point.

” This announcement marks the beginning of a fundamental change that Bersin & Associates projects in the stand-alone LMS market. Our research shows that this market is rapidly bifurcating into integrated talent management systems and highly specialized learning systems.”

While I understand this trend of leaders in Talent Management software (SuccessFactors, Taleo, Peopleclick Authoria, Kenexa) growing through  acquisitions and it doesn’t come as a surprise, I think what’s happening is bad for customers. All these vendors are good at only specific parts of the TM process (like Recruitment, Compensation or Performance) .  The part that made them a leader. (Taleo with recruiting, SuccessFactors with Performance…) They are often poor or mediocre at other parts of the process. Customers buying these ‘integrated talent management suites’ are often locked in to a suite and have to re-engineer their processes to map to the mediocre or poor parts of the suite, losing some of the complexity and richness they enjoyed in the software they used to manage the process previously. Furthermore, the promise of integration is often superficial. Data from one part of the suite does not seamlessly flow to another.

I think this approach of buying one tool or suite that does it all seems outdated. When you see what’s happening outside the world of Enterprise Software, we see that a bunch of sites and platforms interacting seamlessly (Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Picasa etc. etc.) What might be useful is to build a framework like Open Social specific to Talent processes and data that allows seamless flow between different TM tools and other related platforms like ERP, CRM and Enterprise Social Networking and Knowledge Management.

footnote: I think this post relates to my previous post on fB Places and checking in. fB places is guaranteed to be popular because it’s got a captive audience of 1/2 a billion. Yes, more people will use it because it shows up in an app they already visit. But it does not have the richness of foursquare. foursquare was purpose built to do check-ins. It has interesting game elements, badges etc….And it even integrates with fB. But fB users will see none of that richness of foursquare.

This exchange got me thinking about a previous post I wrote about “Social networks will be like air.” The geolocation piece adds a whole dimension to ubiquity. What’s the impact on learning? talent management? Oh..the possibilities! More soon.

Performance review…Boy..is that a hot button issue? Guess who has once again made it a big topic of discussion. Dear Old Prof. Culbert who has now expanded his WSJ article (that I referenced in this post) into a full book.

This morning I caught this post on facebook from NPR which drew quite a response. Other posts on NPR’s feed such as Zombies And Giant Squid: Summer’s Monster Hits! or Spy Exchange Would Be A Cold War Flashback draw on average a couple of hundred “Likes” and 50 to 100 comments. The post Annual Job Review Is ‘Total Baloney,’ Expert Says at this time has drawn 1213 Likes and has 265 comments. And you guessed it…most people hate the Performance Review.

I was watching a presentation on YouTube by Charlene Li (author of Groundswell) at Google and was struck by this statement she made about social networks. At first blush it sounds terribly hyperbolic. But she went on to elaborate on what she meant by it.

And it made a lot of sense.

I don’t think she was referring to social networks as they exist today: facebook, myspace or twitter. I think what she was referring to was the impact of social networks, the information transacted in them or on other sites linked to them or probably anywhere on the internet on our behavior. An easy example is one of Amazon showing us not only the highest ranked reviews for a book but also what our friends thought about the book. Or Yelp alerting me my friends hated a restaurant I am about to enter.

I can easily see how this lends itself to suggesting learning experiences within the enterprise based on what my colleagues, who have interests or aspirations similar to me, enjoyed participating in.

p.s. What also blew my mind was that Charlene said all this sometime around March 2008!