This Week

The ATD International Conference and Expo is an event so huge that it has its own gravitational pull. We’re in its orbit and so I’ll be there from Saturday through Wednesday.

I’m easy enough to find by giving me a shout on Twitter (@aaronesilvers). If you’re shy, just message me, but if you’re not shy, please come up and say hi. I am there to talk shop with you. Yes. You.

I’m not presenting anything after the TRYxAPI event on Saturday, May 16 (12:30-5pm, Hyatt Regency, free to non-attendees). Which means even if (when) I’m hanging out with the likes of Julie Dirksen, Trish Uhl, Cammy Bean and Justin Brusino (among many others), I’m at ATD ICE to listen to whatever you got going on and offer actionable feedback. I’m there to coach. I’m there for you to bounce an idea off of me. I’m there for the jokes. I’m good for a cup of coffee or a beer. I’m happy to grab a bite to eat with you.

For realz. I’m there to hang, make new friends, help folks connect with the people, know-how and resources they need and generally be helpful.

So if you want to talk about how to get a seat at the table, let’s talk about that because I have lessons learned. If you want to talk about designing learning experiences that go beyond slides and classrooms, lets model out those design ideas. If you want to talk about how to break out of your rut, believe me, I’ve been there and would love to help you.

You’ll likely find me in the hallways or in the expo hall hanging with xAPI community folks — including our friends at RISC, Float and Riptide.

If you just want to know activities I recommend at ICE, here’s a short list:

Saturday: TRYxAPI

Sunday:

• Stand Out, Be a Rock Star at Work! – Wendy Terwelp
• How Sears Built a Competency Reporting System Using the Experience API  – Russell Duhon & John Delano
• Virtual Sessions Gone Bad: Tips for Troubleshooting in the Virtual Classroom – Cindy Huggett
• The Science of Behavior Change – Julie Dirksen
• Nano-Coaching: Using Mobile to Make On-the-Job Learning and Coaching Practical  – Marty Rosenheck
• Mastering Mobile Learning: Tips and Techniques for Success – Chad Udell
• Finding Your Fit: Evaluating Learning Platforms – David Glow

Monday:

• xAPI (Tin Can) Meetup
• Community Theater – Science of Learning
• Practical Usage of Social Media for Formal Learning – Dan Steer
• Exploring the Expanded Talent Development Ecosystem – David Kelly
• Use Career and Training Resources in the Public Workforce System – C. Michael Ferraro
• The Accidental Instructional Designer: Designing With Intention – Cammy Bean

Tuesday:

• The New Social Learning – Marcia Conner and Tony Bingham
•  Applied Foresight Methods: Employee Engagement and Patient-Centered Care – Mary Myers
• Analytics and Big Data: Understanding the Next Generation of E-Learning and Its Impact on You – Glenn Bull

Wow, last week a doozy. ATD TechKnowledge had us giving presentations, participating in panel discussions, connecting with old friends and making new ones, too.

ATD TechKnowledge Recap

We presented twice last week. Our presentation on Content Strategy remained basically in-tact from DevLearn this last year with some expansion on granularity, modularity and discreteness. No need to re-download a new slide deck, though. Those details are also included in a new presentation we shared on The Big Picture of Adaptive Learning.

For more than 30 years, the Artificial Intelligence community looked at pre-determined, logic-based approaches to static maps of domain knowledge (that’s a mouthful). In the last five years, there’s been a bit of a shift to make data-driven recommendations and personalized content a reality in the near-term. The technology, math, and science that makes this possible is pretty crazy and how well it works is completely dependent on the design of the content (which informs our approach to content strategy). How well it works also depends on the quality of the data and the accuracy of a learner’s experience with the content, compared to what that content is designed for.

These technologies aren’t ready for enterprise learning yet, for reasons we expose in the presentation — chief among them is that enterprise really doesn’t have enough content to cover the bases. That said, some technologies are here now. The design practices needed to make use of adaptive learning now and into the future represent the best practices you should be applying in your organization’s information and content management practices.

And yeah, that includes using xAPI to collect analytics on how content is used in context. Then compare that to the design goals of that content. Then… continuously improve the content experience to bridge the gaps you discover.

Where Did We Get All Those LEGO Pictures?

You’d be surprised how difficult it is to find straight-up illustrations from one source of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, but as soon as I looked on Flickr, Barney Main‘s pictures showed up. We reached out and he was very kind to give us permission to use his images, and we found others online as well. People like Barney are doing some great stuff with LEGO and we were just glad to be able to share some of that with y’all.

What’s Our Content Strategy Presentation Like?

I hadn’t had the opportunity to formally meet Dan Steer before last week. He had some very lovely things to say about our presentation on Content Strategy.

Read here.

What We’re Reading…

• Jabe Bloom turned me onto a new book, Design for Dasein by Thomas Wendt. It’s all about experience design making use of phenomenology. Fascinating read.
• I was turned onto the concept of Appreciative Inquiry by a few folks this week, which led me to reading more about the concept of idealized design as described by Russell Ackoff.
• Matt Cross has been a blogging machine of late and his post today on how we can do anything, but we can’t do everything is well timed.
• Speaking of experience design and phenomenology, Austin Govella has some really insightful tips on how to even schedule client workshops.

What We’re Listening To…

• Megan has the new Mark Ronson album on repeat.
• I’m digging the new Belle & Sebastian album.

It’s a packed week this week. 🙂

ATD TechKnowledge

We’re pretty happy about getting back together with some of the gang this week at ATD TechKnowledge. We have two presentations this year, some panel sessions (“TK Chats”) and I’m sure there will be more than a few meetups.

• W304 – The Big Picture of Adaptive Learning (Wednesday, 2:45-3:45pm)
• TK Chat – Practical Uses of xAPI (Thursday, 9:15-10am)
• TK Chat – Content Strategy (Thursday, 12:15-1pm)
• TH304 – Content Wrangling: Applying Content Strategy and Information Architecture (Thursday, 2:45-3:45pm)

There are a few other sessions we’d check out:

• TKU 1 – TechKnowledge Unplugged – Fail Jam: Lessons Learned (Wednesday, 10:30-11:30am)
• W108 – Mobile Learning: YouTube Style (Wednesday, 10:30-11:45am)
• W200 – User Experience (UX) Design for Learning (Wednesday, 1-2pm)
• W207 – Mobile Learning: State of the Industry 2015 (Wednesday, 1-2pm)
• TK Chat – State of Mobile Learning (Wednesday, 3:00-3:45pm)
• W401 – If You Build It, Will They Come? How to Increase Learning Adoption (Wednesday, 4:15-5:15pm)
• TH104 – More Than Numbers: A Practical Guide to Designing for Data (Thursday, 10:30-11:45am)
• TH207 – A New Approach to Digital Learning Content (Thursday, 1:45-2:45pm)
• FR106 – Measure Outcomes With Tin Can: The Impact of Performance Observation (Friday, 8-9:15am)
• FR201 – Accountant, Strategist, or Sherlock? Using Data in Context (Friday, 9:30-10:45am)

Interview on E-Learning 24/7

Craig Weiss is an e-learning analyst who consults through his firm, E-Learning 24/7. His focus is on buyers and suppliers in the eLearning industry. We’ve bumped into each other over the past year at a few events, including Docebo’s dConf User Conference in 2013 and again at the Next Gen LMS conference last summer.

In December, Craig reached out to me with some questions about Learning Record Stores and how they relate to the xAPI specification. In answering them, Craig asked if I’d be interested in a more detailed interview. Over the holidays, Craig asked me some excellent questions about the history of xAPI, what’s the deal with its name, how does xAPI fare in terms of interoperability, security and privacy…

Craig asked straight-up questions and I gave him straight-up answers.

It’s long, but I think the interview turned out to be a good read. I hope the responses I gave are helpful. Truth is all in the telling, and I tried my best to tell it in a way people could follow — especially those who aren’t involved day-to-day with xAPI’s development.

Read here.

What We’re Reading…

• China Miéville’s Scar
• Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas
• Sean Putman had a solid post last week on some of the challenges currently with moving data around via xAPI.
• As I consider donning a pompadour, this post on The Tokyo Subculture of 1950s Rockabilly Gangs has some incredible photos.

What We’re Listening To…

• Steve Portigal launched a new podcast, Dollars to Donuts, where he interviews people who lead user interviews in organizations (so meta). In his first episode, Steve interviews Gregg Bernstein who manages Customer Research at MailChimp. You can also subscribe via iTunes.
• Local Native’s first album, Gorilla Manor, has stayed on the record player this week, only to be interrupted by The Clash’s London Calling.

Thinking

It has been a *fantastic* night. #FinalFourBound http://t.co/vWjTmONKT1 pic.twitter.com/SmWHGL2YbF

— UW-Madison (@UWMadison) March 30, 2014

First off… Go Big Red! That’s my Wisconsin Badgers in the Final Four, and while others in the MakingBetter family are bigger basketball fans than us, doubtlessly none are as big a fans of UW-Madison as I am.

Anyway, can you believe it’s April already? Wow. This last month has been a whirlwind for us and we are on the cusp of some pretty damn huge announcements. How huge? Well, let’s just say that if you are hoping for some big things with Experience API and, really, the practice and industry of learning, education and training… well, I think we’ll have some things (plural) that will pique your interest. Stay tuned.

Reading

March came in like a lion and out like… well, a lion with dragon wings breathing fire. Maybe that’s a Gryffin? Regardless, my well-worn copy of Pema Chödrön’s “Comfortable With Uncertainy” has been in my hands for the past week or two and when I’m not cleansing the palate with her insights, I’m reading Scott Burkun’s “The Year Without Pants” as well as Jason Fried’s “Remote” which I got in my swag bag from ORDCamp back in January.

Linking

The last week has been so full of great links we have to chill on sharing all the awesome we got to.

Allan Branch of Less Accounting started up a Coworking space and his own conference… only to find it was distracting from his focus. There are a lot of lessons in this post and his points about what it takes to put on a conference… well, they are wholly on-point, to the effect that it could well be at least a year-long part-time job. At any rate, I applaud the insights gained from taking advantage of the opportunities afforded to those guys and the strength of will it takes to cast aside what, for Less Accounting, were distractions. http://kinhr.com/allan-branch-less-accounting/

Brian shared not only the story about Less Accounting above, but this one by Chris Lema on how to price “risk.” Like pretty much everything, it starts first with doing your homework, doing everything you can under the sun to figure out as much of what you don’t know as possible, and then ask questions back to your stakeholders that are specific, that are targeted at filling in those blanks. Then, reach a mutual understand where everyone feels the cost (and therefore the accountability) for mitigating potential risks. It makes a lot of sense, this guy. http://chrislema.com/pricing-risk/

This last Monday I met up with some friends, including Jim Remsik, fellow community leader, conference organizer, Madisonian and world-renowned hugger. Seriously, he gives amazing hugs. I wish I had a picture of our epic hug. Anyway, Jim shared a great post relating how the author’s approach to filmmaking is also an approach to self-improvement (which, we can all agree, is a pretty loaded term in and of itself). “There’s no way to perfectly and reliably generate only perfect, fantastic, interesting, award-winning ideas and to know ahead of time that everything is going to work or guarantee they will all connect brilliantly with other people. The messy, vulnerable, failure-prone process of getting them out – in conversation, on paper, on a cocktail napkin, in a photo, in a tune you can’t stop humming – is how you figure out if they are any good. Megan said it perfectly, in the essay about essays linked upstream: “As E.M. Forster wrote, I don’t know what I think til I see what I say… The stuff that makes you vulnerable and imperfect is the stuff that makes you interesting. Relatable to others. Perfectly yourself.” Lots of connections back to that John Hagel post we shared last week about influence.

Doing

The next IEEE xAPI Study Group Meeting will be Wednesday, April 9.

Megan and I will be joining Ben Betts, Dave Tosh and others in the Learning Locker/Curatr booth at the ASTD International Conference from May 4-7.

There’s much more we’ve been doing, and we’ll share as soon as our details get locked down.

Thinking

I drink this Cross Fox Espresso roast in honor of my #UP2US14 friends, especially @aaronesilvers & @meganbowe – “what does the fox drink?”

— Brian Dusablon (@briandusablon) March 22, 2014

Above us is The Fox, our logo for Up to All of Us, courtesy of our friend, Jason Early. The fox’s cunning and its ability to work as part of a skulk (or leash… Google it) is heavy on our minds. In fact, we’ve spent the entire week since returning home from North Carolina following up on the things big and small we’ve been charged with. With renewed wind in our sails, we’re focused and stoked.

Linking

Our friend, Brad Wilkening of DevMynd shared this link from John Allspaw of Etsy, on building what he calls a “Just Culture” at Etsy. The focus of this post was on “Blameless Post-Mortems” which breaks the dysfunctional cycle of punishment in figuring out what goes wrong on projects. Instead, “a funny thing happens when engineers make mistakes and feel safe when giving details about it: they are not only willing to be held accountable, they are also enthusiastic in helping the rest of the company avoid the same error in the future. They are, after all, the most expert in their own error. They ought to be heavily involved in coming up with remediation items. So technically, engineers are not at all ‘off the hook’ with a blameless PostMortem process. They are very much on the hook for helping Etsy become safer and more resilient, in the end. And lo and behold: most engineers I know find this idea of making things better for others a worthwhile exercise.” http://bit.ly/1hlb3JN

Doing

On Wednesday, March 26, I’m hosting our second IEEE xAPI Study Group meeting as a Google+ Hangout-on-air. It’s an open group focused on implementation practices and challenges, starting at 11am Eastern.

Last weekend was our third annual gathering of Up to All of Us. Our recap was here in case you missed it.