Competency: Leadership and Management
Leading involves inspiring and motivating. It also involves working collaboratively to address issues and explore new possibilities. Finally, it involves decision-making. AU allowed me develop these skills that I use continue to develop these every day while managing a five-person team.
I entered the AU MEd program not sure if I could cut it and not feeling very knowlegeable. Sure, I'd been a distance education student, but I had never actually worked with anyone else at a distance.
As it turns out, it worked out OK. And the skills I learned through distance education have come in very handy as a part of a virtual instructional design team. I've not met many of my colleagues at AU in person, and I'll likely never meet either my boss or the team that reports to me, but I've made some very good connections in both.
I've included in this section:
- Mii collage of my team. I can not say how much respect I have for each of the people pictured here. With such a great team, leading is pretty easy - and a lot of fun.
- A blog post that further describes the great team I have the privilege of being a part of
- A couple of blog posts that I tossed out at work when I first started - something I'd never had done if I hadn't become comfortable with onlin discussion boards and blogs in Moodle and the Landing. I would have also never had said these things in a meeting in my first months at work, and a Landing post that describes somemore of my thoughts.
I don't think I can overestimate the importance that AU and distance education has had on developing my ability to lead, organize and manage.
The World's Greatest ID Team
Blog Post: What kinds of IDs are we?
As a part of my performance evaluations, I had a little bit of fun...
For all of the IDs I'm currently working with (whether or not you report to me) I thought about my favorite thing I think you bring to the team. Who are you?
Our team attributes:
Patient persistence; Collaborative creativity; Energetic evaluation; Manic multi-tasking; Continually curious; Systems saavy; To-the-point teammate; Diligent in details; Witty with words; Courteous co-worker; Acts to ensure accountability
I'm so glad to have the pleasure of working with you all.I still have a lot to learn from you all.
Blog post: Ideas that might just lead to action
Blogs as a tool for self-reflection in learning? Hmmmm..... I'm going to tell the story of two separate blog posts. One I posted on the Landing and one on my work blog. Both were simply my personal thoughts, musings and hypothesizing. I posted both in the spirit of reflection rather than expecting anything from anyone. And to my surprise, both resonated with a reasonably high number of people (and yes I consider 5 or 6 people to be reasonably high), but more importantly they both resulted in some (small but positive) action.
My ideas might make a difference? Now there's a crazy notion. And the comments and actions of other encouraged me to have more confidence in my ideas, say more of them "out loud" and maybe take some steps towards affecting change myself.
Ideas leading to action leading to more action and more ideas... Wow, I have to say I am warming to these social tools.
Blog Post: Sell it or give it away?
Ask me who I think the corporate leader is in elearning and I'd say IBM. Why? Their name comes up in publications, white papers and journals frequently and members of their training team work as journal reviewers.
Is everything they create really innovative and outstanding? I have no idea. I've never actually seen anything they've built, and I've certainly not seen everything they've built.
But by giving away some of their ideas and sharing with the wider community they've built a reputation (in my mind at least).
Here's another example. Citrix runs webinars of virtual training all of the time. I attended a couple and then read the Toolkit for the Virtual Classroom. It was OK. Then I attended a training with one of our virtual trainers and looked at the Vitrual Toolkit. Ours were better, hands down. But, they are gaining a reputation as experts by sharing (for free). We are not.
There was a time that a product could be built once, and the sold again and again. You came up with a good idea and sold the product.
I think that has changed. Now, you come up with a good idea, develop the product, and then give it away ( or at least a version of it) for free. Why? Because the product is no longer what has the value.
Instead, the value is in the innovation and problem-solving that came up with it - the ability to have another good idea. Getting recognized for having that good idea, also encourages you to come up with another one, a better one.
Early Blog Post: What If...
I've been listening to the talk about moving to Power Point templates as e-learning scripts which sent me down the following path of "What ifs..." that led me wonder why we don't just script in Captivate.
Please bear in mind I come at this with just less than six weeks of actual instructional design experience, so there are likely big flaws in my logic. PLEASE point them out. For me it is the best way to learn.
Much of the eleraning that I've been exposed to is little more than print-based learning delivered via a computer. There's good reasons for that, but to move past that and really capitalize on the potential of elearning, the visual component of scripting is essential.
BUT, I've also done a (very) little bit of editing and know that to make sure the words are right it is helpful to be able to concentrate on just the words.
So that got me thinking...
What if.... the captions could be exported for the CQA process. It turns out that feature in not available in Power Point. hmm....
What if.... we used Captivate to script making static pages? Is creating static slides in Captivate any harder than in Power Point. Wouldn't it be easier to learn and use one program rather than two? Wouldn't it maybe save some time if the development team could just cut and copy bits from scripts already in Power Point? hmmmm....
What if... we scripted using the acutal elearning templates that the development team used in Captivate?We could put the stuff where it needs to be and the development team would then be responsible to make sure it actually works. We'd probably muck around with things we shuoldn't touch and don't understand and cause more problems. hmmmm....
What if..... we could have actual elearning templates with specific development related features locked? Like the Power Point templates, we could pull them out of a library, put our stuff (content)in, and then send them off to development where they could do the fine tuning and care for the more technical side of things. We could also export our captions for CQA. It might also facilitate some great dialog betweeen the ID team and the development team around what is possible, what is desirable and why we do the things we do.
I'm not sure it this is practical or possible, but I thought I'd throw it out there.
