What do you need to know to thrive in the future? Thomas Frey, Senior Futurist at the DaVinci Institute, has listed eight critical skills for the future that he believes should be part of the education of young people. Adults could benefit from these skills as well. The skills in Frey’s list are:

1. Communication Management
2. Reputation Management
3. Privacy Management
4. Information Management
5. Opportunity Management
6. Technology Management
7. Relationship Management
8. Legacy Management

in addition to the eight new critical skills listed above, Frey says that there are “two traditional skills that need to be radically updated to match the needs of today’s world.” These are time management and money management.

The above list is not meant to be all-inclusive for what is needed in the future of learning. But read the descriptions of each of the above skills and you will see that we all need to shift our thinking about almost all aspects of your lives.

Eight Critical Skills for the Future | Futurist Speaker | Thomas Frey | 8 April 2011

I try to watch one or two outstanding TED videos every day, usually walking on a treadmill. Now there is another source of excellent videos, this time on learning and education. This collection of talks is centered on the annual Learning Without Frontiers (LWF) conference in London, UK, and attracts a wide range of speakers. To enjoy these talks, click here.

Note: This item has been cross-posted to Workplace Learning Today (Aug. 6, 2010), where I also blog.

Recently, well known author Jane Bozarth wrote an article on “Brain Bandwidth – Cognitive Load Theory and Instructional Design” in Learning Solutions Magazine. Essentially, the argument in this theory is that “there is only so much new information the brain can process at one time.” This is called Cognitive Load Theory, and it is central to the work of such prominent researchers as Richard Mayer and Ruth Clark. One of the main pieces of evidence for the theory is a 1956 article by George Miller who “suggested that the largest number of discrete pieces of information the brain could manage was seven, plus or minus 2.”

Stephen Downes, in OLDaily, points to Jane’s article, but makes this critical comment: “I think cognitive load theory misrepresents how we acquire and store information. It supposes that information is atomic and symbolic, like a string of numbers.”

I have to agree with Stephen on this point.

In fact, the idea of a limited capacity of the brain to memorize a list of items goes way back to Hermann Ebbinghaus, a philosophy instructor at the University of Berlin in the 1880s. How he came up with this idea is documented in Frank Smith’s 1998 critique of learning theory, The Book of Learning and Forgetting, published by Teacher’s College Press. I quote at some length:

How could anyone make comparisons on any aspect of learning when people are so different, especially in the two things that make learning possible for anyone (according to the classic point of view) – interest and past experience? In the revealing language of science, interest and past experiences “contaminate” experiments and “invalidate” results. People who have a great interest in the topic or activity, and who have had a greater experience of it, are bound to learn more. And they ruin experiments. What experiments need is a method of control… so that the learning task is fundamentally the same for everyone.

…This was Ebbinghaus’s world-changing revelation: if you want to study how people learn without the involvement of interest and past experience — study how they learned nonsense. By definition, no one is interested in anything that makes no sense to them, and by definition, nothing in past experience can help anyone learned nonsense.

Ebbinghaus invented the nonsense syllable, a staple of psychological research ever since. He also described “the learning curve” which is that the ability to memorize nonsense syllables drops off around 10 items, and “the forgetting curve”, which is the memory of most of the nonsense syllables quickly drops off within a few hours.

As Kurt Danziger (one of my professors at York University in the late 1960s) points out in his book Naming the Mind: how psychology found its language (Sage, 1997), Ebbinghaus “defined memory in terms of the work of memorizing and not in terms of the experience of remembering. In this context ‘learning’ was used as a synonym for memorizing, and experimental investigations were designed to answer questions about the relative efficiency of different techniques of learning.” In other words, before Ebbinghaus, the word learning had several meanings in psychological, biological, and philosophical writings, but after, at least in North American psychological literature, learning became synomous with memorizing.

Rereading George Miller’s original article shows that he was talking about a limited kind of task – the ability to discriminate among different audio tones (also a nonsense task). Around 7 different tones, people start to make lots more mistakes. But he also suggests many ways of overcoming this seeming limit on working memory.

It seems that by adding more dimensions and requiring crude, binary, yes-no judgments on each attribute we can extend the span of absolute judgment from seven to at least 150. Judging from our everyday behavior, the limit is probably in the thousands, if indeed there is a limit. In my opinion, we cannot go on compounding dimensions indefinitely. I suspect that there is also a span of perceptual dimensionality and that this span is somewhere in the neighborhood of ten, but I must add at once that there is no objective evidence to support this suspicion.

This hardly seems to be hard nosed science, but it is often cited as “research” for “evidence-based learning”. We need to examine our concepts carefully and critically, and move away from research into nonsense as the basis of our instructional designs. (GW)

Nuts and Bolts: Brain Bandwidth – Cognitive Load Theory and Instructional Design | Learning Solutions Magazine | Jane Bozarth | 3 August 2010

This website represents a shift in my practice as a consultant and analyst for emerging information technologies. The shift includes a move to independent status for me, with several interesting clients. My largest account is Brandon Hall Research, where I continue to work as a senior analyst. But I have several other projects on the go, including:

Author - I’ve just completed my second book project in less than a year, both published by McGraw-Hill. The first book, Training and Collaboration with Virtual Worlds was co-authored with my friend Alex Heiphetz, who continues to develop virtual world sites for major corporate clients. My newest book, The Mobile Learning Edge, was mostly my writing, but colleagues David Fell and Sheryl Herle each contributed a chapter. It will be available in mid-September. Click on the images of the books in the next column for more information.

Researcher – I am currently working on a project on the world-wide treatment of depression, in order to map all the teams that are working on this important problem, and to categorize their approaches to treatment. Information and suggestions are welcome. I have also been using my web research skills to locate missing persons for others who are looking for long lost relatives. So far, I have found 3 people who have not been heard from since the 1960s.

Technology Futurist – I have just finished a major report on future trends in high definition videoconferencing for a Canadian client. I realized that the future of any technology has, in a sense, “already happened” in that it takes 5 to 10 years for a technology to go from invention to commercialization and widespread adoption. By digging deep, and understanding where to look for new innovations, one can discover technologies that exist today but are hidden, that may be prominent tomorrow. Having written many reports on emerging learning technologies for Brandon Hall Research, I am looking forward to more projects in this area.

I continue to monitor innovation in the learning and development industry, and post daily to the Workplace Learning Today blog. I will be updating this site regularly, along with the support website for my mobile learning book. I hope to do a number of presentations at conferences and online in the coming year, and look forward to working with old friends and new clients.

A review of:

Sweeny, Alastair (2009) Blackberry Planet: the story of Research in Motion and the little device that took the world by storm. Mississauga, Ontario: John Wiley & Sons Canada.

In 1999, I attended a meeting on technology innovation at the Toronto Board of Trade. The person sitting next to me told me that she was investing in a Waterloo, Ontario company I had never heard of called Research in Motion (RIM). Shortly after that, I acquired my first Blackberry and was enamored with the ability to receive e-mail on my belt. I also tried to use it to read news and weather reports but found that the page by page loading was terribly slow.

The Blackberry has come a long way in the past 10 years, ranking right up there with the top two or three brands in smart phones. Alastair Sweeny’s new book Blackberry Planet chronicles the growth of RIM from its beginnings in 1984 as a two-person technology startup in a one-room office to the multibillion dollar company it is today.

The two people who started the company were Mike Lazaridis and Doug Fregin, young engineers in their early twenties. They began by making LCD display screens for the General Motors Canada assembly line. 10 years later they won an Academy Award for a film bar code reader, “a device that revolutionized Hollywood.” But, being engineers, they had little interest or focus in running a business. Luckily, in 1992 experienced businessman Jim Balsillie join the management team with a $250,000 investment, becoming the co-CEO with Mike Lazaridis.

Contracts with AT&T, Rogers, and Ericsson led to the development of RIM’s growing expertise in miniature radios and pagers in the 1990s. In 1996, RIM produced the world’s first pocket-sized, two-way pager. That led to the development of the first Blackberry, the 950, two years later.

Sweeny’s corporate biography gives details on the successes, tribulations and failures of the company from its beginnings to the present day. Sales of Blackberrys were boosted into the stratosphere by such events as the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina. In these disasters, the Blackberry e-mail network kept working while most other means of communication went down. Sweeny writes, “during the horrific attacks that day in New York and Washington, the only people trapped in the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers who were able to contact their loved ones after cell service failed were those with Blackberrys. Police, firefighters, and ambulance drivers and US Vice President Dick Cheney all used their Blackberry devices during the crisis.”

The fact that President Obama has insisted on keeping his heavily modified Blackberry in spite of concerns by the Secret Service that could be hacked, has resulted in massive positive publicity for RIM. At the present time, the US government is the single largest user of Blackberrys, owning over 500,000 of the devices.

But it was not all rosy on Blackberry Planet over the years. A whole chapter is devoted to lawsuits that were filed against RIM and by RIM for patent infringement. Particularly difficult for the company was a lawsuit filed in 2001 by NTP Inc., a company known as a “patent troll.” The business model of such companies is to buy older patents with the hope of successfully suing other companies for infringement. After lengthy court case in Richmond, Virginia, RIM settled by paying NTP $612.5 million. It could’ve been much worse.

There’s also a chapter on the problem of Blackberry addiction, and the disruptive effects that 24/7 phone and e-mail access can have on family life. In reviewing the social impact of Blackberrys, Sweeny cites a large Canadian study by Linda Duxbury and Chris Higgins who interviewed more than 100,000 mobile-device equipped Canadians and their families from 2006 to 2008. In 2007, the research team started focusing on Blackberry use almost exclusively. They came up with the following statistics on users:

• 37% checked their Blackberry occasionally.
• 37% checked their Blackberry frequently.
• 26% said they checked their Blackberry only when they were traveling/away from the office, but then used the device constantly.
• 10% said they checked their Blackberry constantly (more than 20 times per day).

Respondents also said that they handled an average of 24.7 Blackberry messages per day. The negative impact on families was apparent. “Many spouses weren’t at all pleased, and 55% said their partner was making ‘inappropriate’ use of their Blackberry several times a day, using it constantly to check their e-mails at home or in a social or family setting.”

The book ends with a chapter entitled “The Rise of the TeleBrain.” The author quotes Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media, where he calls humans “an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide.”

This well researched book documents how we got to this state, and where it is going to take us next.

The book has a support website at http://blackberryplanetbook.com.

Why are classrooms so powerful, and so hard to change? That is my starting question for a webinar I am leading on Webnesday, August 12, from 1pm – 2pm Eastern Time.  In the webinar I look at modern classrooms as a learning technology that was first developed in 18th century Prussia, and then spread out throughout the world. We will look at school architecture before the emergence of classrooms, and see how the classroom is one of several state institutions that developed during the period that Michel Foucault has called “the great confinement.” Like prisons and mental hospitals, classrooms captured and constricted bodies in order to render them as docile subjects. Their purpose was as much disciplinary as educational, developed as part of the new bureaucratic state apparatus that brought unruly people under social control.

The power of the classroom as a technology gave teachers the ability to better regulate large groups of students, in order to inculcate them with a standardized curriculum. Pushed to the extreme, monitorial classrooms of the 19th century could hold over 1000 pupils, all performing the same acts, under the watchful eyes of senior students (“monitors”), and the instructor.

A review of the history of corporate training shows that, with some notable exceptions, classrooms were not widely used in comparison with other techniques such as apprenticeships, on the job training, and “vestibule training”. But classrooms came to be the dominant site for corporate training after World War II, culminating in the “corporate universities” of the 1990s.  Interestingly, classroom use in corporate training may have peaked as e-learning, mobile learning, augmented reality, and gaming start to infiltrate the corporate learning scene.

My sister Sharon (PhD. student at Dalhousie University) tagged me with a new meme on naming the 15 most influential books that have stuck with me over the years:

Rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. List 15 books you’ve read that will always stick with you. They should be the first 15 you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Tag a few other people. 

In no particular order…

1. The Birth and Death of Meaning – Ernest Becker
2. The Duality of Human Existence – David Bakan
3. The Pornography of Power – Kurt Danziger
4. The Tacit Dimension – Michael Polanyi
5. Rabbit Run – John Updike
6. Being and Nothingness – Jean Paul Sartre
7. Autobiography of a Thief – Jean Genet
8. For Your Own Good – Alice Miller
9. The World According to Garp – John Irving
10. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues – Tom Robbins
11. Black Skins, White Masks – Franz Fanon
12. How Children Fail – John Holt
13. The Whole Earth Catalog (several editions) – Stewart Brand
14. To Have or To Be – Erich Fromm
15. Politics of the Family – R.D. Laing

Turns out that 15 is way too short…

While many people I know are on Twitter, there are lots of others still just looking at it or wondering how to get started. In response to a friend’s question on how to build up a list of people to follow and how to acquire followers, I wrote this set of tips. If they are useful, pass them on:

1. There are three types of messages in Twitter - tweets that include someone’s Twitter name (i.e., if you put @gwoodill in your tweet, then I will get it), replies to someone else’s tweet, and direct messages (DM), but only if the person has turned them on in their settings. The first two methods are public (anyone can see them) and the third way is private.

2. There are different styles of Twitterers. Some people use it mainly to talk to their friends and family. Unless you know the person, you probably won’t find their tweets very interesting. Some people are there mostly to market their products and services. If you need something, I’m sure there is someone on Twitter who offers what you are looking for. Personally, I use Twitter as a research tool/search engine, and as a place to both give to the community within my industry (adult learning and development) and to receive from the same community.

3. To get a following, and not just follow, you need to post useful stuff for the community you want to attract. My tweets are mostly about learning and technology, my main area of interest. As well, the people I follow are mostly in this industry, and I use the Twitter stream to pick up fresh ideas and innovations as they happen. I put out occasional calls for assistance on a topic, and I contribute references and ideas when I see that I can be helpful. Most recently, for example, I responded to @davecormier with some references to a book and three articles on the links between medieval guilds and modern communities of practice.

4. Start by following a few hundred of people in your area of interest. Use the Find tool to locate 2-3 well known people in your field of interest on Twitter. Look at each of the people they are following, and at their followers. If a person’s bio or Tweets relate to your topic, then follow them. For example, if you look at the people I follow, then you will find mostly people in corporate training and e-learning. A significant percentage of the people you follow will follow you back.

5. Later, as you build up the list of people to follow, you will want to “cull” your list to the most useful, productive or interesting people. This process is a little like doing a wine reduction when cooking; as you reduce the list of people you follow to the most relevant to your interests, your Twitter stream become more intense and interesting.

6. Retweeting is a way of spreading a tweet that you like to your followers. It also often makes friends, as people like to be retweeted. They take it as a compliment. So, retweet the most interesting tweets that you read. Preface a retweet with RT and include the person’s Twitter name. e.g. RT @gwoodill This is a great book…etc. But, don’t just retweet – make sure you add your contributions to the stream.

7. Send out at least 1 or 2 helpful, useful, funny or interesting tweets a day to be seen as someone worth following. If you are inactive the number of people following you tends to drop off; if you tweet too frequently, you can be seen as overly intrusive or “loud”. While it is acceptable to mention what you are doing, don’t spam with tweets about your products or services. You need to find the balance.

8. To increase the number of people following you, find directories that list Twitterers by category, and list your Twitter name under each keyword that describes your interests. 

9. Use the search tool on your home page or go to http://search.twitter.com to search for your topics of interest. Also search for conference names in your field. There are now often Twitter stations at conferences and people attending sessions at conference who post tweets, which is another way to find active and interesting people.

10. Note the convention of using hashtags (#) to pull together people in a group or around a topic. For example, searching for #PM will yield hundreds of potential contacts in project management. You will see other interesting hashtags to search with embedded in the tweets of others. 

I hope that helps. Once the ball starts rolling, it’s fun to see your lists build. Send me a tweet at @gwoodill to let me know how it is going.

Many learning management system (LMS) vendors experience the following scenario. A prospective client arrives at their tradeshow booth and asks, “Does your LMS do compliance?” The answer to this question is not a simple one.

The concern with compliance is driven by laws and regulations that require specific training, the desire of companies to avoid liabilities, the implementation of business objectives, and the reduction of paperwork. To understand this topic fully, we need to distinguish between the ability to track compliance in a number of areas with the fact that, as a piece of software, a learning management system may itself need to be compliant with certain standards and regulations. It is also important to realize that laws and regulations are specific to individual countries or states, and will likely vary widely from one jurisdiction to another. The examples below are drawn from the United States and Canada but there will be parallel issues in the legislation of other countries.

Here are the main compliance issues that one needs to consider in choosing a learning management system:

Accessibility standards – there are two aspects concerning accessibility and LMSs. The first one is to ask whether the learning management system and its website is itself accessible to people with disabilities. The second is to ask whether the learning management system can track accessibility of online courses and face-to-face training opportunities. In the United States, accessibility regulations come under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Section 508 (29 U.S.C. ‘794d) of the 1998 Rehabilitation Act. In Canada, these standards are known as Common Look and Feel (CLF) standards for government websites. These standards closely follow the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0.

Human Resources standards and regulations – most countries have passed legislation regulating employment that may or may not include aspects of training. For example, in the United States there are Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) regulations and provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Many other countries have equivalent legislation. Given the overlap between human resources management (HRM) software, talent management software, and learning management systems, this may be an area that potential clients want to explore in their requirements for a LMS.

Interoperability standards – one the earliest demands of LMS users was that courses developed by different developers work in the same learning management system. This led to the development of one of the first sets of LMS standards, those of the Aircraft Industry CBT Committee (AICC), which published its first guidelines in 1989. In 1997, the IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS GLC), a nonprofit member organization devoted to setting specifications and standards for the learning industry, was formed, and has issued many sets of specifications since that date. The same year (1997) saw the announcement of the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) initiative of the US Department of Defense. ADL developed the Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) and the ADL Registry of SCORM compliant software. LMS vendors are well aware of both AICC and SCORM, and generally say that they are compliant with both standards. However, in practical terms, most LMS implementations don’t work well with these standards “out of the box” and often require a period of adjustment and tuning to make them work seamlessly.

Quality standards – compliance with quality standards can be managed with an LMS and tied to both competencies and diagnostic/gap analysis procedures. These, in turn, can be linked to individual or group training plans. Relevant standards include workplace and manufacturing quality standards such as the ISO 9000 series, the QS 9000 series (US auto industry), ISO 14000 (environmental practices) and Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) standards. These all can have implications for training.  Managers may also want to ask about the software engineering processes of the LMS vendor, to see if they conform to either ISO 9126 (evaluation of software quality) or the Software Engineering Institute’s Capability Maturity rating (1-5).

Regulatory compliance tracking – learning management systems, because they are essentially large databases, are often asked to track regulatory compliance with specific government legislation. Examples in the United States include the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) regulations. In Canada, the requirements of training for the Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System (WHIMIS) are sometimes tracked by a LMS.

Security standards – many organizations require very secure systems to store personal information. This is especially true in the medical field but can apply in many other areas. Requirements here may include the maintenance of audit trails, the deployment of completely closed systems, the use of digital signatures, such as the US Federal Drug Administration regulation FDA 21 CFR Part 11 for the medical, biotech, and pharmaceutical industries, and the use of high degrees of encryption for groups such as the banking industry. The is an ISO standard for information security – !SO 27001. Only a few LMSs are certified to this standard.

Tracking training for required certification and recertification – there are lots of examples of regulatory compliance for training in specific industries, where employees are required to be certified before being on the job, and need to be recertified on a regular basis. Many LMSs track certification, and can issue automatic alerts as the date for recertification approaches. This need can be driven by legislation or by standards imposed by a specific industry or company. Examples would be workers in the nuclear industry, or air traffic control, who need to keep skills up to date and at optimal performance levels.  

Tracking training for liability reduction – training can help reduce liability for employers in areas that can be controversial. Courses or educational materials on such things as sexual harassment, or employment discrimination, might be much less expensive to provide (and a good thing to do in any case) than the settling of lawsuits in disputes in these areas.

Reduction in paperwork – Finally, a fully functional LMS can have features that reduce workload and paperwork for compliance management. Such features can include auto-enrollment in compliance training based on job, automatic notifications to managers and workers on failures to complete compliance training, assessment and evaluation of compliance training, issuing of certificates on completion of compliance training, and many other configurations for tracking and reporting in this area.

So the answers to questions on compliance and learning management systems are not simple and are multifaceted. Hopefully this short guide will be of some help in sorting out what you need to do in this area.

I spent a portion of today getting a software upgrade for my implanted defibrillator, as part of the checkup I get every six months to see how this life-saving device is functioning. It has already been subject to one recall, for the wire that goes into my heart, which in some cases can fray and malfunction.

The software upgrade is to allow me to connect with a box near my bed that will be in constant wireless contact with the device in my chest. It will take scheduled readings on the state of my heart while I sleep and send the results to a server in Chicago, where they can be accessed and read by the cardiac health professionals at my local hospital. I won’t even know that the readings have been taken or that the data has been sent. So much for privacy!

The checkup today allowed the friendly nurse at the clinic to read the functioning of my heart for the past six months, to test the device by turning a dial to make my heart go faster or slower, and to check that everything is functioning as it should.

This amazing capability is only one example of how new medical devices area attaching themselves to our bodies like electronic leeches, purporting to cure but also turning us slowly into involuntary cyborgs.

There is more of this on the way. Toto, a toilet manufacturer in Japan, has a model that checks your urine stream, and sends the results to your doctor via the Internet.

And various types of smart underwear are now being used to monitor both the health and location of individuals in case they have a heart attack or wander too far. UK researchers have developed a “smart bra” that checks the woman wearing it for breast cancer.

All these wearable and implanted devices are converging – soon there will be a pacemaker with built-in GPS in the same unit, and perhaps a Bluetooth transmitter to play digital music into your brain implant.

If you think all this is far-fetched, check out Lynn Marentette’s post on User Interface Engineering; she writes about ambient kitchens to help cooks with memory loss, digital jewelry to help track people with Alzheimer’s Disease. 

This new world is already here.