Learning technologies

I have become passionate about the importance of learning and training. By providing the very best in learning opportunities we can help learners to succeed  both at work and in their lives.   It is this strong belief that drives my desire to seek out and implement new learning solutions.

Everything I have and continue to do in instructional design and performance consulting is completely tied up in technology, so much so that it is difficult for me to separate it out from everything else I have done and will continue to do.

The only things I am certain about with technology are:

1. It will continue to change and open up new posibilities. Ideas that were good ideas but not implementable a decade ago should often be revisited.

2. We need to learn how to use it to do what we do now faster and smarter. In only a sinlge small example, we are currently looking at writing curriculum in Excel (in the absence of a good LCMS) in order to streamline maintenance. But it requires us to think and segment data and information differently, and move from a linear approach to information development to something modular. The idea of learning objects as Lego has been around for a long time... We might just be getting to the place where using technology, we can in fact get there.

3. Technology should enable mass customization and more learner choice. In my current project, we are looking to create traning that will be taken by more that 8000 learners per year. Up until now, creating content to be delivered at close to 20 globally-dispersed sites has focused on distilling it down to the common elements to create a single global curriculum: Commonality will lead to consistency in performance. Technological changes however may allow us to start thinking of each of those 8000+ learners as individuals: Variablity in training may be the real key to consistency in performance. 

4. It can result in less reading and telling and more seeing and doing. Images, videos and simulations used to (in the olden days 3-4 years ago) be very expensive and slow to create. Now we can create sims, videos, and compelling images with a high level of ease and speed. 

5. We can work more collaboratively, cross-functionally, and  globally. In only a couple of hours of a day last week, I collaborated with an operation manager in Cebu, Philippines, a client in Laredo,Texas a Content Engineer in Bangalore, India and an instructional designer in St. Johns, Newfoundland. I can do all of this from the comfort of my home office before geeting my kids off to school in the morning.  Technology allows us to transcend the boundaries of time, space, and physical location. 

6. People are resistant to change. Sometimes people embrace new tools and can adopt new tools within their current tasks. Starting to think differently about possibilities from the ground up is more difficult. Open-ended problem-solving in not a widel held strength among most people and yet it is critical to harnessing the potential various technologies offer.

Using new technologies must be as much about teaching people to become more open, problem-solvers as about the development of the technology itself.