What do you mean by “Content”?

Thought-leaders in the training and development field have a new mantra: “It’s not your job to develop learning content.”

By that, they suggest that practitioners in the field spend too much time packaging – or repackaging – information that the learner could instead access at-need from existing corporate documents, using a search functionality.

If all that’s required is this type of information on-demand, the audience is truly better served by a strong search tool and access to all documents on their company’s network; even a wiki is overkill.

Now here’s the But you’ve been expecting…

Right now I’m updating my skills with the Adobe Creative Suite applications. Especially on tools where I have little experience, like Illustrator, I very much appreciate the structured training presented by experts in online classes, such as Lynda.com, as well as various printed books. With scant contextual knowledge, I wouldn’t know where to begin – wouldn’t know what to search for. I need an on-ramp.

A colleague provides another good example: A career changer, she’s starting over in a field where she has a lot of potential but not much background. It is also a new-ish field where formal training, and even best practices, are not fully developed. Gathering resources to create her own knowledge base, she is feeling the lack of an organized flow of information that would help her to get her bearings more quickly.

This seems to be the critical difference – the watershed: The needs of existing staff learning a new task or protocol, versus the needs of an outsider being on-boarded.

As humans, we naturally balk at being forced down a narrow training-tunnel with no adaption for the individual. But swinging to the opposite end of the pendulum – abandoning trainees to meander directionless across the learning landscape – is no better, and could send the message that it’s not important to learn one’s job, or that one is being set up to fail.

What about creating a curriculum – isn’t that enough? If by curriculum we only mean a sequence of topics that the person is to look up and study on their own, my answer would have to be No.

Learning by trial-and-error is great at the task level, but at anything higher it’s just a waste of time, and I don’t know many businesses that have a lot of time to waste.

Sorry, thought-leaders, but it is my job (sometimes) to develop content.

The problem with career assessments …

During my job search, I hit on an idea regarding the various assessments and career-matching tools available to us.

Many fields are changing, as far as the actual duties and tasks required from day to day. This is certainly true for my former field of Technical Communication. The whole move from print to online formats, the switch from discrete documents to “structured authoring” where bits and pieces are assembled from a CMS, the advent of user-generated content ala Web 2.0, and so on.

However, the career matches generated by the assessments have not changed. The instruments are still using the same criteria they’ve always used.

TechComm illustrates this pretty well: The assessments still use “creativity” as an indicator that techcomm would be a good fit. But with structured authoring, that’s not nearly as important as the inclination to be hyper-organized, or even more technical aspects like enjoying coding XML and creating databases.

Someone should do a thesis or dissertation on this idea …

Brain glasses

As we get older, our eyesight may not be what it used to be, so we wear eyeglasses to bring things into focus.

What somebody should invent is brain glasses – so that, when our mind seems fuzzy, we could just put on our brain glasses, and it would all come crystal clear.

I think that would be a great invention.

Postmodernism as a wall

A while back, I thought about going into academics. I was working on a Masters in the humanities and all was well except … I just couldn’t do postmodernism.

Maybe it’s my background in the hard sciences, but when people would say that nothing really exists, it was difficult for me not to respond, “Well, why don’t you just give me all your money then? It exists to me.” When recognized experts insisted that words have no intrinsic meaning, I fought with myself not to say, “Well then, why should I pay you to teach me? Why shouldn’t it be the other way around?”

Yet I do see value in postmodernism. To me, it’s kind of like a wall. Not the Great Wall of China – more like a wall in an obstacle course.

I can take my ideas, opinions, and theories and bounce them off that wall, paying attention to which direction they bounce and how far, etc. This kind of testing of our ideas can reveal hidden presuppositions and prejudices, helping us to refine out thoughts and better line them up with reality. I was doing that instinctively before I even knew what postmodernism was.

The wall is really useful, but …

You can’t live on it. And I think maybe that’s where people go wrong.

They try to live on a vertical surface, instead of on the ground. It’s a little like the ancient pillar saint Simeon Stylites. To be sure, it’s an achievement to live your life in such an unlikely position. But gravity will catch up with you at some point, and then what’s it all been for?

Where’s the key?

You know how, in some office buildings, you have to use a key to access the restrooms? If all the keys go missing, it can be a bad thing.

That would never happen if one of the following ideas was used:

• The fob on the keyring contained an RFID chip
• The fob was the kind of thing restaurants use for waiting customers: flashing lights and a vibration mechanism

I bet these could work for hall passes in schools too … hmmm …

Scalzi on “Fear”

This post is a quote from The Sagan Diary, by John Scalzi, 2006. Outstanding insight, IMO.

… [Fear] is what it is; the serpent in my ear, whispering the promise of the fall.

I am human. Fear lives in me and sets to make my heart bitter. But I know something about Fear. Fear is a scavenger who feeds on the future; on what may be and what is possible, extending down the line of our lives. Fear lives in me and I cannot change that. But I choose to starve Fear. I choose to live here [and] now.

Sure doesn’t look like a cell phone

Someone needs to run with this idea ’cause there’s money to be made.

Many rehab hospitals and other short-term healthcare facilities prefer residents to use cell phones. Indeed, temporary in-room phones (like you’d find in hospitals) are often not available.

However, a cell phone is much more difficult to use than an old-style phone for residents who are elderly, who have a tremor, or who lack fine motor control.

So, why not design a hybrid: all the electronics and working parts of a cell phone, but housed in an old-style phone like the one pictured here:

Key design points:

• Large number pad
• Volume control (preferably a dial that can be turned, rather than up/down arrow-type controls)
• No buttons or controls on the receiver
• Heavy base to keep the phone stationary
• Input ports, if needed, located on underside and protected with covers
• Power cord plugs into wall outlet

Since many times the need for this design is temporary, perhaps the cell phone companies could lease the units by the month. Maybe they could collaborate with the healthcare facilities, reprogramming a unit for the resident’s existing cell phone number to facilitate billing.

Anyone out there with ties to the cell phone industry, or know someone who does? Please run with this, and let me know where it leads.

Lessons from POTC

A light-hearted post for the holiday!

Those who know me well, know that Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies are some of my favorites.

While I don’t want to say, “Everything I need to know I learned from POTC,” I’ve spotted some big life lessons in each film.

“POTC: Curse of the Black Pearl”

1. Be yourself.
2. If you know what you want, you’ll find a way to get it.

“POTC: Dead Man’s Chest”

1. If you don’t know what you want, sometimes your friends can help you get it.
2. Go ahead and face your biggest fears; you might find yourself saying, “That’s not so bad.”

“POTC: At World’s End”

1. “It’s not just living forever, it’s living with yourself forever.” (spoken by Captain Teague in the movie)
2. Good people keep their promises.

What did you learn from “Pirates?”

Us and Them

For a long time now, I’ve been trying to make my “Us” bigger – to include more people in it.

Seems to me that a lot of social ills stem from a small Us that brings an adversarial tone to interactions with the majority of people. If I can just see more people as part of my Us, it keeps the tone positive and helps me to feel at home – among “My Own” – more of the time.

And every human being has something in common with me, even if it’s just the fact that we’re human.

Where does this idea of Us and Them, of  My Own vs. outsiders, come from? It seems ubiquitous, so it’s not culture-specific. Is it a carryover from the stage of life when children differentiate themselves from their parents, but taken too far? Do our minds slip into the thought pattern of the children’s game, “One of these things is not like the others …”? Is it hyper-individualism?

I appreciate the concept of otherness, written about by many noted thinkers including C.S. Lewis. And I’m not advocating that everyone is or should be the same – uniqueness is a precious gift.

But realizing that I have a choice of who belongs in my Us – that it’s not just automatic, that it can be flexible, and that nobody else can force my choice – has really opened up the world for me. It has actually helped me to delight in uniqueness, since more and more people are part of My Own and not adversaries.

What do you think? Should everyone try to expand their Us? What would happen if we did?

I don’t believe in tolerance …

I believe in respect.

After all, do you want to be “tolerated?”

Wouldn’t you rather be respected?

Tolerance doesn’t go anywhere near far enough. We need to respect other people.

And if I want you to respect me, I’ve got to respect you first – to earn your respect, because it’s worth something to me. Respect isn’t cheap.

Funny thing, though, is that most of American culture is built on disrespect: just about everything we think is funny is some form of ridicule or derision.

But here’s the silver lining: In this context, showing just the tiniest bit of respect for another person stands out like a blazing light in a darkened room. People always notice when you treat them with respect; in our culture, you can’t help but notice. It’s amazingly refreshing to the human soul.

So I encourage you to join me in going beyond tolerance – rain some respect on a thirsty soul today!