We believe in being up front. Honesty. Transparency. Frankness.

So we’re a bit disappointed that we won’t be joining you guys for some conferences this year. We could, but … well, we’d have to pay to be there. I’m not talking about the registration fee. I’m talking paying to be up on the stage.

Yep. There were several conferences we looked at that were eager for us to speak – as long as we were willing to pay for the privilege. Whether we had something good to say wasn’t the criteria, and that just didn’t sit well with us. Kind of a switcharoo on those who want to hear from people of substance and not just those of means and opportunity.

That kind of wheeling and dealing certainly doesn’t increase credibility for vendors who do take the stage. And hurts attendees by not focusing on what makes for good content first. Our call to conferences would be to cut the games and judge presentations on the fit for the audience first and foremost and only. (And for you, the attendees, to demand and expect that!)

Understand, we’re not trying to whine about it… or whinny. We’re just sorry we won’t have as many opportunities to “spread the gospel” of learning standards and meet as many of you as we originally hoped. However, we will be able to catch you at a few places in the next few months:

• Learning Solutions – Not a speaking gig, but you can hook up with Mike next month in Orlando.
• e-Learning DevCon 2010 – Mike gets the really technical, heavy-lifting presentations. He’s got two at this conference, one talking about what to include about SCORM in an RFP for an LMS (based on his white paper) and a hands-on technical session showing how to take advantage of our open platform to develop modules and plugins and extensions that take learning anywhere.
• International Conference on e-Learning in the Workplace – Tim and I (or one or both) are scheduled to present here. Two sessions, one explaining SCORM in plain English (as plain as I can make it) and one looking at the kind of reporting you can get out of SCORM.
• Campus Technology 2010 – Mike will be in Boston for this one with a longer version of our SCORM in plain English presentation. Check him out on Wednesday afternoon (July 21) and be sure to ask a lot of questions.

Got something specific you’d love to see us cover in a session? Let me know and we’ll make sure to answer it! (Well, OK, I’ll try to make sure it’s on the agenda. Can’t control what happens after that sometimes.) Going to be at the same conference? Definitely let us know because we love putting face/voices/reality to online connections.

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Paul Saffo has some interesting things to say, but nothing that jumped out at me until he started talking about Facebook. According to his Stanford students, “Facebook is so over. It’s for 30 year olds.”

Has sentiment on Facebook turned?

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Next great thought from Paul…

We are each creating for Google when we pass them a search string. That search string leads to the ads they are able to display. Great way to think of it… We create something that they can sell.

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Everybody is talking about Facebook… I mean, the blogosphere is just obsessed with it… Me? I’m not totally sold on Facebook as the killer app, but I am fascinated with how cultural/internet phenomena intersect with SCORM and eLearning.

Shon Bayer from Enspire Learning in Austin led a session this afternoon on Facebook. It was really interesting to watch a diverse group of learning professionals ponder its impact. Truthfully, more of the people were grasping Facebook’s impact on their life than were pondering their learners’ lives, but it was still interesting.

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I spent part of the morning with a topic near to my professional heart… Session 110 was titled “A Web Service Architecture for Integrating SCORM and Experiential Learning”. Yes, it’s a mouthful.

More or less, Ginny Travers was presenting BBN’s solution from an ADL prototype that extended ADL’s Sample Runtime to allow for non-JS based interaction with the API. See more information on it here.

I won’t bore you with the details of it here. There were aspects of the solution that bothered me. Proposing a non standards based solution to a standards problem seems counterproductive in a sense. The majority of people in the session seemed to believe this was a present, available solution… It is not that…

I agree, however, that a web services layer of SCORM is needed. We most often see this manifest itself in a desire for a teacher to grade a student’s essay. SCORM simply doesn’t allow for any communication outside of the browser session. If this additional pipe were opened, it would greatly open the functionality that could be implemented. The student could submit the essay, the teacher could grade it later, and the score/information could be submitted to the LMS without the learner reopening the session.

One last thought… LETSI needs to do some marketing. From our association with the group, we know well that its intentions are spot on. But messages are getting around that SCORM will be stripped back (removing sequencing and navigation) and that the concept of “CORE SCORM” will result in a moving target for the standard. LETSI will certainly consider these issues carefully, and change will come. It is unfathomable to me, though, that so many earnest standards contributors would allow it to drift from a path that they have pursued for years. Interoperability and access will continue to drive the people of LETSI, and the result will be an improved standard.

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I’m often impressed by the visionary keynote speakers at these conferences. The themes are relatively similar, but they often express them in insightful ways. Sir Ken Robinson spoke today on the importance of creativity among other things. First, I’ll share a couple of pearls he offered…

• Our imagination is our defining difference from other creatures… our ability to consider things that are beyond our senses.
• Divergent thinking is suffering in our education system. This one reaches me personally, as I consider my oldest daughter’s (a first grader) path through the school system. Robinson quoted a study on Divergent Thinking where a group of kids were tested at three different times as to their ability to achieve at a genius level in divergent thinking.

• At age 3-5, some 98% qualified as geniuses in this regard.
• At age 8-10 (same group), that number had fallen to 32%.
• By age 13-15 (same group), that number had fallen to 10%.
• And a similar group of people over the age of 25 measured a mere 2%.

• Conformity is a huge concern for me with school. I absolutely feel like my daughter’s ability to think creatively has been crushed by school. To a shocking degree, first grade has been all about how to conform. Robinson echoes this… obviously this elimination of diverse thinking is not the intent of the school system, but it is a substantial effect.
• So, what then? Well, the big thought is, “What’s the responsibility of the organization?” Robinson points to an analogy. The company should be like a farmer. Farmers don’t make plants grow, they simply provide an environment in which the plant can flourish. His challenge to us is to make our organizations and teams conducive to growth of creativity. This leads me to my thought…

How does this apply to products? How does it apply to SCORM? Well, it’s a bit of a stretch, but I’d like to find products and evolutions of our products that allow our customers to be creative in our context. Our work is about removing the painful roadblocks in creating useful online learning. It’s a good challenge for us as we define our product roadmap and as we help guide the evolution of the standards.

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Another week, another conference. This time I’m in San Jose, CA at DevLearn2007. My expressed purpose in being here is simply this: I want to understand the innovative technologies available in eLearning. What better place than a conference in Silicon Valley, right? So, three days from now, I hope to have shared some interesting new approaches with you.

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Back at it this afternoon… (quotes are loose)

• John Howley, legal expertise
• “Tell your lawyer what you need from them.” This is the great incentive to get your lawyer up to speed on the things you require.
• We have developed in the common law tradition, in which judges were driving law creation based on existing law. Recent developments have pushed us away from that toward legislation only. Interesting… everything I hear today asks that judges not legislate. Is it inherently bad?
• “Get away from the lawyer as risk avoider.”
• Scott McPherson, CIO for Florida’s Legislature and Florida’s Pandemic Coordinator
• A pandemic is a novel virus, to which humans have no immunity
• A pandemic requires sustained human to human transmission
• He gives some compelling reasons to fear a pandemic
• The first risk he mentions is that we haven’t had a pandemic in so long
• I acknowledge that this has little to do with learning, and less to do with SCORM, but I’m fascinated, so you get it here.
• From Eisenhower, “The plan is useless, it’s the planning that’s important.”
• Wayne Hodgins
• Here comes the relevance… Wayne is going to talk about the future for SCORM and LETSI.
• Adoption exceeds expectations dramatically
• The commonality of the problems people encounter is surprisingly high
• Learning Education and Training Systems Interoperability (LETSI) is a federation of organizations loosely coupled to shepherd SCORM forward
• Elliott would love…
• An open standard API that allowed for plugging things together… Editor’s Note: This is a great idea, but incredibly difficult. In this case, the devil is absolutely in the details. But, it’s a great place to start.
• Could you maintain your learning profile on a thumbdrive?
• What should we expect?
• Q1: LETSI becomes a formal organization
• How do we prioritize the needs?
• Announcing: The Global Learning Expedition
• Wayne is going south from San Francisco in a boat… literally
• More or less, this a focus for Elliott and Wayne on global learning

Well, the relevance level came up slightly. Stream of consciousness blogging is what it is…

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Session 646 was titled “What if Amazon and Google Partnered to Build an LMS?” Good thought, and something we’re thinking about all the time. Google and Amazon are doing some things really well, and we’d love piggy back on many of those concepts.

Thoughts from the group (and these aren’t new to us):

• iGoogle as personalizable, “LMS” homepage
• Context aware content suggestions/recommendations for learners
• Profiles. How can we establish a profile on an individual and use that effectively.
• Commission based virtual classroom. Editor’s Note: This one really resonates for me. Democratization of content production and offering is fascinating to me. I want a brilliant content producer (like Jenny Zhu of ChinesePod) to be able to deliver content to people directly.
• How do you incent learners to take the content?
• Tie all of this into “communities of practice”
• Access to a system of mentors, or an SME network?
• Amazon/Google are trustworthy, innovative, easy to use. LMS’s fail in this regard today.
• Usage statistics on the content itself… which pieces of content are useful and used.
• A suggestion to check out Epic 2014
• They want to stop thinking about SCORM and AICC (I know someone who can help with this…)

So, the most interesting thoughts and questions to me…

• The best analogy I heard for a training department of the future was that of the “newsroom”. Newsrooms are looking at all the stories, structuring them, validating them… Training departments need to be doing the same things.
• How big does an organization have to be in order to make use of “the wisdom of the crowds” for creation of content? Can a 500 person company effectively generate content at the bottom levels and then confirm its validity? Can we please open up LMS’s and centralize them like Google and Amazon so that usage data and information has a massive audience?

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Don Tapscott (Wikinomics) talked this morning, and spoke on his vision of the future. This is a guy with tremendous credibility in predicting the future. The most interesting thing he shared (to me) was this:

Technology, to kids, is like air. It’s just there.

I’m pretty comfortable with technology, but it did occur to me, perhaps for the first time, that those who are coming behind me are more comfortable with it than I am. I think I like that.

Brought to you by SCORM.com, the e-learning standards experts.

Yup, I skipped my 200 level session for the blog… it was basically more of the same from my 100 session.

So, Session 320::Rapid Online Prototyping. (The link is the wiki page from the conference… pretty cool stuff.)

Richard Culatta led the session, demonstrating how freely available tools could be used to create content iteratively and quickly. This is a concept near and dear to my heart. Blogs are one of many tools that I believe can be aggregated to create great learning content. I’m fascinated by the tools of the web as well (youtube, flickr, etc).

Richard used several free tools (Thinkature, Fauxto, etc) to similar effect. Here’s the problem:

The process is disjointed. I can grasp the leap between the tools, figure how they fit together. But it’s not immediately apparent. In the course of the session, it was obvious that the tools are not entirely ready, and they certainly aren’t tightly integrated. How do you put it together elegantly? How do you best aggregate these tools?

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