LCB Question for December: 2006 - 2007

The Learning Circuits Blog has gotten real ambitious now: their question of the month for December is actually three questions. And real tough ones, each of them. Anyway, here are my quick responses. Three points for each question, in the interest of brevity. Some personal, some not quite.

What will you remember most about 2006?

• Migrated to Mozilla Firefox as my default browser, and a Google-based portfolio (Personalized Home, Google Desktop, GMail, and GTalk) as my main window to the web world. It has changed my surfing, blogging, and communication habits (my entire computing habits almost) like nothing else has.

• Discovered new friends and re-established contact with old ones through LinkedIn, Orkut, Shelfari, and the like. Made me realize I socialize better online than face-to-face. (Or have I reversed the cause-effect relationship here?)

• Started reading blogs in a significant sense this year – discovered a host of great bloggers (check my blogroll for some key ones). Coincidentally (or may be consequently), started my personal-professional blog in September 2006. Have managed to maintain the momentum so far. Will be a challenge for 2007 as well.

What are the biggest challenges for you as you head into 2007?

• Far too often do sponsors (especially in corporate training environments) give briefs based on what they want, rather than what their learners need. And then when the learning product is not appreciated by the learner, they come back to us and say, “You should have told us before; you are the experts.” So how do we drive that into sponsors before the act? How do we get them to just leave it to us? A challenge for me, and for the other designers in my organization.

• Convincing clients and colleagues (especially those on the selling side) that “faster-cheaper-better” is a myth. They don’t constitute a three-legged stool; rather, they are three vertices of a triangle of fixed area. I wish someone would develop a research-based model that would help determine how to optimize one at the cost of the others and how to achieve a “satisficing” balance across the three.

• Establishing with my designer and manager colleagues and clients that simplicity is a good idea in eLearning design. Strange as it might sound, many people seem to think that simplicity is easy to achieve and hence is not a good idea. Or they don’t seem to understand what simplicity means. Seriously.

What are your predictions for 2007?

• Informal learning will face a classical paradox: if it starts gaining ground as a formal discipline, will it still be informal? I know this sounds a bit convoluted, but it is an area that keeps coming back to me – informal learning is undeniably important, inevitable, and ongoing, but can we actually create informal learning? May be we can create an informal culture in a workplace, but can we really go beyond that? I’ll wait for Jay Cross’s book to hit bookshelves in my country (at a price I can afford J) and then frame my argument better.

• Early adopters move in to Second Life, in the learning sense. I get a sense that Second Life could be a cost-effective and immersive learning environment, so some action there seems logical. As a corollary, visiting Second Life regularly (I just signed up some months back and haven’t gone back since) could be an action item for me next year.

• Client organizations and learning providers continue talking about RoI on learning. And it remains just that – talk. Honestly, I don’t even know whether RoI is a valid concept in learning – may be the teaching/training process can be measured because it is a formal process, but the way a learner learns and applies the learning is possibly informal and governed by more than just the learning, and hence cannot be measured or calibrated.