PC Magazine Solutions Articles

Since we share our subscription to PC Magazine here at the NCSC, I recently received an issue that contains the article "Eight Handy Tools in Excel You Probably Don't Know About".  Following that I looked at their Solutions website and found some additional excellent articles that are listed below:

Microsoft Outlook: 9 Things You Didn't Know You Could Do
Customizing Comments and Revisions Tracking in Microsoft Word
Troubleshooting Word Macros
Deal with the Outlook E-Mail Deluge in 4 Steps

And for you Mac users:
Office 2008 for the Mac: 8 Things You Didn't Know

eNapkin

I'm at the Dan Roam - The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures
- keynote at DevLearn. You can find something similar here.

What problems can we solve with pictures? All of them. We all know how to do this.

Three quarters of our brain is dedicated to visual processing.

After you hit age six or seven, in education we stop emphasizing visual thinking.

The act of creating the picture forces us to think in new ways.

Whoever best describes the problem is the one most likely to solve it. (Much like asking better questions.) Subtext: whoever draws the best picture gets the funding. Southwest airlines started on the back of a napkin in a bar in San Antonio. They print all their cities on their napkins. Presidential Doodles: Two Centuries of Scribbles, Scratches, Squiggles, and Scrawls from the Oval Office squiggles & scrawls from the Oval Office. Pretty cool pictures.

Arthur Laffer - take place in a bar - drew the famous Laffer curve. Drew it originally for Rumsfeld and Cheney. Great story.

25% of the people in any meeting - black pen people - can't wait to get to the whiteboard and start drawing.

50% of the people say - "I can't draw", but can go and highlight. Good at highlighting important parts.

25% sitting back - red pen person - say - "Mapping out problem at superficial level." Too much detail.

Way to get red pen person to the board is to get them so upset that they feel they need to get to the board.

Why do we use PowerPoint to communicate? Just a tool. What PowerPoint allows to do, enables us to become lazy to turn off and fill in the squares in.

How to create an eNapkin? Can run PowerPoint in Adobe Connect, WebEx or other virtual meeting software. PowerPoint - launch it and run the best drawing tool - on screen drawing application within PowerPoint. Lower left corner icons. Touch sensitive drawing tool. Can see them at same time. Really crazy part is that anyone can participate.

I will have to try out the eNapkin.

By creating something on the paper, you get over the hurdle of where to start. He suggests a pattern with "Me" and "My Problem" ...

Bill Gates quote - The barrier to change is complexity.

Shows picture of MS Word with all the tool bars open.

Drawing pictures of interface ignored details and that actually got around common objections.

The more human your picture, the more human your response. The mind likes to look at things that match the way we see. The six ways we see:

1. Who/What - identify the objects in the world
2. How many - identified how many of them there are - more than three - more than 9 - thus it's a lot.
   
3. Where - only tells us where things are - in reference to where you are. Only combined later in the brain.
   
4. When - represent passage of time by seeing location of object in time
5. How - looks for patterns
6. Why - make sense of the patterns

Six ways that we see. Any problem can be broken into six pieces using the above. Only need to learn how to make six kinds of diagrams.

1. Who/What - Portrait
   
2. How much - Chart / Dots
   
3. Where - Map
   
4. When - Timeline
   
5. How - Flow chart
   
6. Why - Mutlivariable plot (diagram with multidimensional data)
   

Next time you face a problem - you use one of these types of charts or combinations of charts.

Wong-Baker faces chart Pain Rating Scale. Tufte - information visualization. Venn diagram shows conceptual spatial relation between objects. Hard to get something drawn in a circle.

Any problem is like a big layer cake. There are more flavors inside than anybody expects. Start with a general drawing and then drill down.

eLearning Research

At a panel at DevLearn. We have:

• Will Thalheimer, Work Learning Research
  
• Kevin Oakes, I4CP
• Claire Schooley, Forrester
• Chris Howard, Bersin
• Kevin Martin, Aberdeen

Biggest trend is Learning 2.0 trend. A shift in Training Methods. Allow people to work faster, better through informal learning. eLearning 2.0 addresses informal, on-the-job. It's relatively new. Bersin is publishing report on learning 2.0. Collaborative. Learner in charge. Looking out there for the information they need. Find it. Use it. And it sits there. Younger generation used to finding things on their own.

Talent management being discussed in the board room. Performance management. Learning and performance management converging finally. Linking development plans, career paths, learning opportunities. Leap to 2.0 before they get the foundation right.

Good, Chris, called him on this. Learning 2.0 is so different. 2.0 is chaotic. Talent management is structured.

Statistics from ASTD research -

• 86% - web 2.0 technologies likely to use more in learning function than they do today
• 41% - using technology for informal learning at high or very high extent

Kevin Oakes - "learning is getting left behind as people look at talent management." Only 19% say they have integrated talent management to a high or very high extent.

Learning 2.0

• Trust is barrier
• Culture is number one barrier - knowledge sharing is problem
• Reluctance among potential mentors to teach each other
• Time is problem

Qualcomm - employees submit business plans. Have festival where employees vote on best business ideas.

What percentage should they invest in Learning 2.0 - answers ranged from 20 to 50%?

Economy

Do we have to do anything different?

• Shift priorities to align better.
• Use cost lowering technologies (video conferencing, web conferencing) to save money
• Look at criticality of retaining workers
• Improve performance of existing workforce
• Should be good for L&D to be more accountable

GE CEO - told training leaders - need you to step up. That's not the norm. Rest cut training budgets during down economies. Prediction, unemployment is going from 6.4% to 8% over the next 12 months.

Focus on how you can impact sales and cost reduction activities. That's what people care about during tough times.

Talent Management

Where does learning fit in? Is training organization taking a back seat?

Strategic effort - learning is part of it, but not leading it. Broader focus. Especially when you talk "Integrated Talent Management."

Kevin mentions how Learning Management System companies have move towards Talent Management. See Rise and Fall of LMS.

Why are you getting into talent management?

• Compete in marketplace
• Retain
• Need to innovate

Hiring manager focused on better quality candidates. HR may focus more on time-to-hire.

Informal quarterly reviews were differentiator between best in class and those not.

Measurement

Must be done the way the business does itself. Revenue. Profitability.

Not a top priority. Talk about it. Don't actually do as much as they should.

Recognize they are not doing as a good a job as they could, but generally roughly okay.

Best-of-class (top 20%) - want to have metrics. Which means they don't today.

Josh Bersin's book suggested as resource for what impact training has on organizational performance - The Training Measurement Book: Best Practices, Proven Methodologies, and Practical Approaches.

Best in class - training organization design. Hub and spoke is a good approach.

Question from audience: Can learners effectively handle control of their own learning? What does research show?

Some debate, but no research on this yet. Somewhat goes to the fact that this would be hard to measure for most kinds of organizations.

Organizations need to think of Learning 2.0 as a learning style thing.

New Literacies

At the Tim O'Reilly keynote at the DevLearn conference. His outline is very interesting in that he's promising to talk about the "new literacies." I'm hoping this is going to be similar to Work Literacy.

He uses the same quote I often use from William Gibson -

The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.

Pattern recognition is key. What do these companies have in common:

• Google
• eBay
• Yahoo
• Amazon
• MapQuest
• Craigslist
• Wikipedia
• YouTube

Built on top of Linux (open source). Services. Not packaged apps. Data aggregators, not just software. Network effects are key to their market dominance.

Dell Ideastorm, Starbucks, Best Buy, SAP (Harmony), YattIt, BeingGirl (P&G) mentioned as examples. Allow people to share ideas. Social media in action.

At DevLearn - tend to equate Web 2.0 with Wiki, Blog, Social Bookmarking, Social Networking, etc. - instead it's really systems that harness network effects. The lock in is data.

Eras - Hardware (IBM), Software (Microsoft), Network/Data (Google). Data is the Intel inside of next generation. He's explaining PageRank.

Wesabe - contributing credit card data. Allows us to see spending at particular stores, repeat at stores. Wow, very cool data. Wonder how we could get access to that?

Mentions Google putting testing over the toilet.

What do you need to teach people? Not about the tools. It's about how to use them. How to leverage the data? Core competency of information age - leveraging collective intelligence.

Get away from old model of data. Hadoop. Computer Science shifted to teaching Hadoop to freshman from teaching SQL. Deals with messy data better.

Statistics. Design. "Big part of the new literacies."

These new literacies are not unlike talking about visual thinking as a literacy, new kinds of synthesis. The level of these "literacies" is interesting to me. Much more challenging to develop these literacies.

Suggestion - study the people who don't need your help. Go find the people who are on the leading edge and study them. The "Alpha Geeks."

Turn the Alpha Geeks into the mentors. They would pair Alpha Geeks with good writers.

Provide self-starters with access to the best resources. Online reference tool - Safari.

Show, then do, with reinforcement from frequent small successes. Get people engaged with the process.

Watch someone doing something right can improve your own performance.

Read in reviews - people talk about themselves. Very cool concept from Kathy Sierra. She is awesome at those kind of ideas.

Importance of hands-on. Magazine - "Make" about playing with technology.

Cites Wikipedia the missing manual. Literally just bookmarked How Wikipedia Works this morning.

People are telling us about these technologies, not telling us how to change. Create peer learning opportunities.

Study success stories.

"Stop fondling the hammer and focus on the house." - It's not about technology. It's about what you are trying to accomplish.

I'm not sure that Tim connected the high level concepts with what each person needs to do. I'll try to do it at 1:30 at my presentation. :)

Per Question Reports

I received a good question from a reader:

Our school district uses Blackboard. We have recently been exploring putting more coursework online and have experimented with the Articulate line of products. Blackboard has done well for us although I am not pleased with their support of the SCORM standards.

I would like to be able to export SCORM test results by user/by question but all Blackboard seems to support is general pass/fail records. Now I can drill down to the individual results via the Bb gradebook but that just won't work for exams that are being giving to hundreds of students.

I have spent many hours researching this issue related to SCORM compliance and more specifically how to get the test results exported out of my LMS for more in depth analysis in Excel or perhaps some type of statistics package.

Would you be able to point in the right direction of a resource to help me get this done or please let me know if I am wasting my time. Perhaps the world has moved onto something else as most of the conversations online I am able to find regarding SCORM matters are 2-4 years old which in Net time as you know may as well be decades.

This brings up a bunch of initial thoughts. First, having worked on custom LMS, LCMS, Authoring projects and being pretty deeply familiar with SCORM, it's easy to blame the LMS for poor reporting on per-question reporting, but its very hard for an LMS to create generic reports that work well across all the variations that you run into. So, if the source of the statement "I'm not happy with their support for SCORM" is only the issues of reporting, that's a bit unfair.

I'd be curious what they are going to do with question level reporting. I've had a lot of clients initially say they want question level reporting. I always drill down on why they are going to do it. The most common answer is that they want to know if there are particular questions that lots of people are missing. But, in many cases (in corporate eLearning) there will be no attempt to go back and fix the course or update the test. So, if you really aren't going to do anything with the data, don't bother. It's a lot of work to get the data, look at it, decipher what it means and do something with it.

So let's get to the more helpful pieces of information. First, it appears that they are getting question level data in the LMS. That's good. And not always the case. In many cases, people will implement a SCORM course and/or LMS to only handle SCO / Module level reporting or even just course level reporting. But in this case, they have the data. Good job Articulate and Blackboard!

So, the easiest thing to do is to get a data extract from the LMS into a CSV that then you can manipulate in Excel. You should absolutely start with this to figure out what you really want to do with the data. You can do this in Blackboard by using the the "Download Results" with the "By Question and User" option. Here's a good plage showing this:

http://kb.blackboard.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=14551263

Once you've done this a few times and have figured out what you want your reports to do, then you can define a custom report using Crystal. Sometimes it's a bit hard to get at the data on a per-question basis, but I'm pretty sure there's a good view in Blackboard.

Let me say again, do not bother to try to define your custom report until you've done this manually across several courses/tests that will expose all the different ways that the data may come out. Then you will likely begin to appreciate the complexity. You may end up deciding to just look at the data via CSVs.

With all that, I'd love to hear your thoughts/ideas around:

* Do you use question level data / reports? If so, what do you do with it?
* Generic LMS reports that you have found useful for reporting at the question level?