What real good has Facebook done? and is it worth it?

Amidst all the hullabaloo surrounding recent changes to Facebook's privacy policies (and practices?), a friend posed a question to friends and family members connected via Facebook: "What real good has FB done? and is it worth it?"

For me, Facebook has been evidence of social networking coming of age. Not to come off as a fogey, but "I was there when it all started." In the past, I made some new friends online whom I've valued for nearly 2 decades, and I was lucky to reconnect with a couple people I'd lost contact with along the way through life. But the thing is, all the people I connected with online in the 90s or even the early 2000s were pretty geeky - a lot of lost old friends remained lost.

The real good that FB has done for me is as the vehicle that *actually works* to reconnect me with some favorite, far less tech-savvy people from every stage in my life. Several things had to shift to change that:

1) The online population had to reach a critical mass. Not just getting email accounts, but also becoming "present" online, which means building a version of themselves via providing information.

2) Tools had to get friendly enough for Grandpa Joe and Auntie Luddite to be able to use them. The tools we used in the 90s were primitive and non-intuitive, and presented a huge barrier for the vast majority of people.

3) Revenue had to be reachable in order to pay for the programmers and other creators required to make those tools. Plenty got built by hobbyists and academics back in the day, but the results were, as mentioned above, only friendly to geeks.

Facebook costs a bunch of money to run and evolve, but it is "free" for us to use. The cost to all of us users is the information we trade for access to all the tools and toys and people that we get to play with on Facebook.

As a businessman, I recognize the value of that information in a visceral way - if I can't get people to give me some information about themselves, I can't reach them to tell them about the products I create and sell.

Here's the thing I think it all boils down to for me: I am responsible for what information I put on Facebook.

They don't - and won't - have my social security number nor my credit cards.

They don't have any info I don't consciously give them, including in my status updates, the groups I join, the names of the albums of photos I post, and the people I connect with.

I don't post evidence that I went out and got hammered on Friday night. I don't "friend" old aquaintances who are too stupid to be discreet about youthful indiscretions that may or may not have allegedly occurred when I was an allegedly indiscreet youth. I don't post strong political opinions, or spout about things I wouldn't say in front of my mother. I give enough public info that old friends searching for me can find me, and shut down the rest of it to "friends only."

Through some clever algorithm, the ads I see on the edge of the page as I surf FB are relevant to me. I see more ads for snowboards and training conferences and mountain vacations and bands I like than I do for diapers or dating services or motorsports or whatever ads YOU see. I see that as a benefit! (and again as a businessman, hooray for effective targeting of ads!)

I'm not a pollyanna about all this. Someone I grew up with no doubt has a photo or two that would embarrass the hell out of me if they posted it. Some stranger might learn a little more about me than I would share with them in the physical world.

And I'm HUGELY RELIEVED that my kids think FB is stupid - I shudder to think of the things I see some of my friends' kids post and how it all may come back to haunt them! And the drama of teenage relationships just gets magnified in all sorts of horrible ways on FB.

But my friend asked - is it worth it? The way I'm using it, most definitely.

Some minor marketing we do for GCP has exposed a broader audience to our products and people.

It's a blast getting surprised by old friends from around the world and seeing what my cousins are up to while we all remain too lazy to write letters to each other.

It's great to be able to see where my friends are skiing next weekend so we can get together.

And it's very satisfying to see friends who don't know each other getting the opportunity to benefit from the mutual connections that "networking" means by definition.

g-LMS Pre-Press Release

We've got a big announcement that will probably take place next week, but I'm so excited about it I find I need to use this blog as a rough draft of whatever press release we end up issuing.

We've been sitting on some technology we had in our back pocket for quite some time as we concentrated on growing and improving our e-learning content catalog and getting it the heck out in the marketplace.

In the process of talking to the marketplace, though, we found we were hearing over and over again: content alone is often not enough (compliance training by definition needs to be tracked), but commercial Learning Management Systems (LMSs) are often way too much tech for small and medium-sized companies. The "enterprise solution" is made for really large enterprises!

Here's what our clients and prospects have been telling us they need to be able to do in order to efficiently manage training:

1. Add learners to courses (or assign courses to learners)
2. Manage passwords/logins
3. Quickly and clearly see who has completed the training
4. Quickly and clearly see who needs a fire lit under them
5. Download reports in a form that can be further manipulated, imported into other company record-keeping systems, etc.

Here are some of the features of standard commercial LMSs that our clients and prospects specifically did NOT want or need:

1. Elaborate succession planning tools
2. Automated gap analysis tools
3. A bunch of different reports on all the possible minutiae of learners' activities
4. Months of study and specialized training just to have a clue how to run the damn thing

Slap to the forehead - we realized we already had the roots of just what these people have been telling us in some coding for tools we'd created in the past, and all we needed to do was pull it all together with the features we're hearing this demand for, and voila, the GCP's g-LMS - Global Learner Management System - will most likely launch at the end of the week!

It's a super thin application - tiny on the server, very obvious and intuitive interface for both learners and training managers (and our administrators who will run it in the background). It's elegant without being fancy at all.

For now we'll be hosting it, as that's what the market's been telling us to do. But down the road, we'll be able to license it to clients who want to run it on their own servers - we built the basics into the tool to do just that and will only have to tweak a few things to be able to deliver on that capability.

Also... nope, I'm getting ahead of myself; let's just get this thing launched this week! Stay tuned for a real live press release, and a demo site where you can try it for yourself. Can't wait to hear what you think!

DIY Custom Training, Facilitated

Interesting article by Agatha Gilmore in Chief Learning Officer Magazine: The New Workplace Mantra: 'Do It Yourself'. That DIY theme is exactly what we had in mind when we put together Ultimate and Developer's Editions of our courseware.

In her article, Agatha says:

"According to new research from Novita, a talent recruiting and development services firm, 71 percent of organizations surveyed are now doing more tasks in-house than before the economic recession. The main reason? A smaller budget, according to 85 percent of respondents."

The predominant mode of purchasing e-learning content has long been handled via the tired and painful "learner-seat" model, in which a company basically rents access to courses they need from the content vendor who owns the courses. I've said it before: Whoever came up with the learner seat subscription model was a sadist, a masochist, or both. It's beyond onerous to try to predict how many employees need these seven courses, which subset of employees need these other two courses, etc.

And when you rent courses, you are sometimes offered the option of customizing the courses, but they don't belong to you, so the time, effort, and money you spend customizing is in the toilet as soon as you stop renting from that vendor. It's a terrible model, and I really do not understand how it's hung around as long as it has.

We've always had our ears open to the needs of those Do It Yourselfers, whom Agatha Gilmore says are growing in number.

Here's what we think: If you've got a person or a small team of people in your company who are charged with producing training content, wouldn't they be a lot more productive, effective, and profitable if they had a giant head start on the courses they need to develop? If the hardest part of the development were already done for them and available in a "kit" format that enabled them to tweak and refine rather than building from scratch?

I've developed a ton of courses. I've been involved in every step of course production, from needs analysis to determining learning objectives to creating a storyboard to gathering media elements to creating the multimedia, and through all the steps of testing, revising, and updating them.

The hardest part in all those steps is putting the content into words. Writing the storyboard takes the most time, requires the most smarts, is the most painstaking. It's the key to the course. It contains everything that everyone else involved in course development needs - the words and ideas to be conveyed, and the instructions that will turn the words into a living, functioning, effective course.

How much time, effort, and cost would it save your team to start the course development process with a completed storyboard? A well-crafted storyboard, with clearly stated learning objectives, elegantly-written instruction, and assessments tied to the objectives, in Word format for ready customization?

How much less time would it take to modify an existing course than to write it from scratch? How many more courses could your team put in front of learners each year - heck, each month? Would you save more money on development than you spent on the development kits? Only one way to find out...

Top Ten Insights on Top Ten Lists

Leo Casey posted a thoughtful list of his Top Ten Insights on Learning in the

Learning, Education and Training Professionals Group on LinkedIn this past weekend, as a summary of his recent blog posting.

Leo's list:

1. Learning is constructed
2. People are curious
3. We learn best in social settings
4. Much adult learning is child's play
5. We have a Learning Identity
6. Meet the Digital World
7. Adults learn what they want to learn
8. Learning can be additive or transformative
9. We learn throughout life
10. We strive to be all that we can be

After 8 years teaching at the university level in a VERY multicultural setting, and the subsequent 10 years developing online learning experiences in collaboration with adult learners and the training professionals responsible for their programs, I must admit I always worry that lists like this pretty much automatically reflect the listmaker's learning preferences or specific training environment/subject matter/audience.

I know I catch myself declaring that "learners want [insert preference here]" when in fact, I may want that thing, but others may not!

And that training "thing" that *I* am sure learners want or need might be the best way to impart safe work practices in a manufacturing environment, but at the same time be a terrible way to hone customer service skills in a retail setting, for example.

So item #3: "We learn best in social settings." I have to ask, who are "we?" Learning what? In what kind of social setting? Group work with motivated teammates on project-based learning is fantastic, but there are certain learning objectives best mastered in quiet solitude. My replacement insight: "Training modalities must be selected with both the audience and the learning objective in mind."

I also find that lists like this tend to idealize the learners. There's a big difference in attitude between happy lifelong learners who decide it would be fun to learn a new language, and employees who are required by law to receive training on how to choose the right protective gloves or eyewear for this or that workplace task. So I would revise a couple of the insights above.

For example, #2: "People are curious." I myself don't choose to spend more time than I have to in the company of non-curious people, but really, have you never met a person who was devoid of curiosity? Never had a conversation that consisted of you trying to get more than a grunt out of your interlocutor? The non-curious do indeed exist, and they are not exempt from compliance training. My replacement insight? "Training needs to engage even those who are not curious."

Likewise, item #10: "We strive to be all that we can be." But guess what! Homer Simpson is not a completely fictional character - you and I might strive for excellence, but my friends, there are slackers out there who feel as Homer does that "Trying is the first step towards failure." They don't have a mission of doing their best or being their best. Self-improvement is not among their core values. My replacement insight? "Training must sell its own importance to those who don't care."

My overall point is, lists like these can help us focus on important points and provide an excellent starting point for deeper reflection, but we have to be careful not to flavor them with our own biases.

Holiday Hopes

In a haze of happy post-Christmas cheer and relaxation, I'm hoping you've had a wonderful holiday. In fact, I hope you're still on holiday and won't read this for another week. I'm so filled with hope, I hope that you love this blog so much, you checked in to see if there was a new one today even though you don't have to return to work for another week!

I hope the roads and airways are safe for all those traveling over this holiday. I hope that it snows a lot before I go snowboarding again next week. I hope that my family loves the Christmas gifts they received, and I hope my son who's away at college didn't suffer too badly spending his first Christmas alone. I hope my 16-year-old new driver uses good sense and doesn't drive too much like a 16-year-old new driver.

I hope that you kept your job this past year or found a new one quickly, and that 2010 is a good year from your company. I hope that your workplace is safe and that your company nurtures and values a positive training culture. I hope that your boss treats training as an investment, not a cost center.

I hope GCP has a successful year: I hope we sell lots of online training at GCPLearning.com, and I hope we continue to give it away for free to those who need it at GlobalTrainingPeople.com! I hope lots of our free training members post their stories and photos there, and that our GTP professional community blossoms, grows, and serves its members well.

I read Hope is Not a Strategy by Rick Page a couple years ago. An extended quote from the introduction still resonates with me. It's about sales and selling, but I think it relates to home, health, and work hopes as well:

I believe that hope, along with faith and love, are essential to life. Hope is what you do when you have no control. But a strategy is made up of actions and tactics that convert visions to results for those who can make things happen. The title of this book was chosen to accentuate the differences between positive attitudes and positive actions and the flaw of counting on on without the other.

I bet you have a lot of the same hopes I've written about here. And I hope you have taken time to make a strategy to achieve all your hopes!

Here's to a happy end of 2009, and a 2010 filled with hope.

Merry Christmas!

Happy Holidays to all! Be safe, be smart, enjoy!

Why Not Video?

People hear "training" and often assume "video." At GCPLearning, we've never included video in our online courses. It's not a mindless choice; we've considered our options thoroughly. There are technological, logistical, and pedagogical reasons for that choice.

Historically, trying to deliver video online to the typical e-learning client was just a bad idea. Existing bandwidth simply wouldn't support it. In the early 2000s, when we thought that most client companies would have at least a T-1 connection, we designed for 56kbps dial-up speeds, as we still had a significant number of clients stuck in the dial-up era. We even had a client in 2002 who still used a 28.8kbps modem in a shed to access our training when it was too rainy outside to work. (I believe they also walked barefoot in the snow to work and back home, uphill both ways, and they liked it like that!) Although high-speed connections are now entirely the norm, there are plenty of demands on a company's internet bandwidth without adding to that a lot of users pulling down video.

I mentioned logistical reasons for not using video. Regular readers of this blog know that I do tend to go on and on about AGILITY. Video is not an inherently agile medium (though it can be if you go lo-tech... topic for another day!). The content of our courses is necessarily dynamic - regulations change, best practices evolve, and the equipment pictured in the illustrations goes out of date. Besides, we provide source code with our content so that our clients can freely customize the courses they purchase from us. Video production is costly in both time and money; revising courses becomes a much more convenient, economical, and doable proposition when it amounts to rewriting sections of the storyboard, recording fresh narration, and swapping photos in the flash content files. Of course, in keeping with our key principle of agility, our Global Content Player is equally adept at wrapping Flash videos as it is our standard Flash screens, so the option to include video remains open. We are more agile without video, and so are our clients.

So that's technology and logistics, but most important of all is obviously the pedagogical principles. If it's not good instruction, it doesn't matter how easy it is to download it or edit it. Ultimately, video COULD be an engaging element in some of our courses, but the feedback we've received from countless clients and a few focus groups we've organized support our contention that a series of photographs is just as effective - or even more effective - than video. Photos capture decisive moments in time. (Henri Cartier-Bresson said about photography, "The decisive moment, it is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression.") The photos zero in on decision points or the most important steps in processes, without the distraction of intervening frames that would be present in video. They allow us to meet our learning objectives through that focus.

When we balance the three reasons - technological, logistical, and pedagogical - photo series wins out over video in our media selection for our courses.