“What are the most important attributes for an LMS for a medium/small sized organization?” mussed an ASTD member this morning. He went on wondering if the most important attributes were price, speed of implementation, or specific features that are “must haves” in a small or medium sized organization.

I thought I would share my answer with you in case you too have been wondering about this.

“What are the most important attributes for an LMS for a medium/small sized organization?”

A ‘free’ full function LMS can be obtained via open source…so it may not be price.

If a small or medium organization has not invested in content that needs to be loaded into the LMS the implementation of the LMS takes less than an hour…so it may not be implementation.

LMS systems are converging when it comes to features and functions. They all support AICC/SCORM, and there are many “Learning Off the Shelf” (LOTS) vendors that provide content that will load into any LMS system thanks to the industry standards…so it may not be course availability.

I suspect the biggest issue for the small and medium sized companies is the understanding of the benefits and organizational changes needed to really implement a learning culture–something that NO LMS system can do. Thus it is the change initiative that needs to happen before an LMS is selected and MUST continue until long after the LMS is up and running that is the biggest hurdle.

If you would like to see the original thread, just go to the ASTD Community Forums.

• Build a system for aggregating informal content. Much easier to find valuable content when it is in one place.
• Provide tools and training so SMEs can create better informal content.
• Provide minimal support. Some folk just need a bit of help capturing or editing the content. But they control the content that is posted. Think of this as “ID lite.”
• Allow a discussion to take place around the informal content. This can be done by linking a discussion forum to the aggregation system mentioned above (see first item in this list). A good comment system can also suffice.
• Allow content to be voted on. This allows the best informal content to be noticed and the worse to be demoted or hidden once thresholds are met.
• To track informal content, I created quizzes that were in the LMS that when passed, recorded the learning event. After all in the spirit of knowledge acquisition, it does not matter if knowledge was gained via formal or informal means.
• Lastly, create a culture of giveback–so that others learn to share as well.

Companies are, after all, made up of men and women, people with different cultural filters, and differing wants and needs.

As educators we need to be extra careful of word use. The interrelation of thought to word and word to thought is a complex dynamic process. The process undergoes constant change as individuals interact with their environment. “Every thought tends to connect something with something else, to establish a relation between things. Every thought moves, grows and develops, fulfills a function, solves a problem” (Vygotsky & Kozulin, 1986, p. 218). This movement occurs through the planes of action and the planes of knowledge. As we master a topic it moves from conscious thought into our subconscious.

Educators run a terrible risk when they assume that learners understand them. This is especially true when using technical jargon, but it can creep into other conversations as well. Spending time to teach vocabulary as it is used in the field or course being taught is time well spent. As Vygotsky said, “it is not just the [hearing impaired] that cannot understand one another, but any two people who give a different meaning to the same word or hold divergent views” (Vygotsky & Kozulin, 1986, p. 239).

As educators we need to remember to first lay the foundation for understanding. This may mean ensuring that the vocabulary that will be used has the same meanings attached to it by all learners, or taking the time to negotiate a shared understanding.

Reference:

Vygotsky, L. S., & Kozulin, A. (1986). Thought and Language – Revised Edition. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

[houdini]

If you have ever wondered how life would be if technology was actually available when you needed it, could seamlessly work between your computer and anything handy, then this video is worth watching.

This paper will introduce the reader to a simple approach to audience analysis using Bloom’s Taxonomy and and Knowles “Performance System Domain” as the framework.

AudienceAnalysis_SimplyConcise.pdf

If you would like a copy of the Audience Analysis Template shown in the paper, the template is included below.

AudienceAnalysisTemplate.dotx

Google Wave is Google’s answer to the question, “If e-Mail was invented today what would it look like?” Wave is an interesting approach and is still under development, so if you want to use Google Wave, remember that there are no guarantees of performance or stability–though it has been working very well so far.

What is Google Wave? The best visual I can think of is this…

Imagine that you begin writing a note to a friend or friends. You open a blank note/document and start to write. When you are done writing, you send it to your friend(s). Meanwhile you decide to go back and edit the note–your friends have already begun to read the note, and they can see in near real-time that you are adding to the note while they are reading it. This is close to a live chat session–but with one major difference. Playback!

Playback allows someone that comes late to the note to rewind note to the very beginning and then play it forward to see what was added when and by whom.

Couple this with the ability to branch a Wave into a new Wave, and the ability to embed rich media directly into the note and you begin to see the power this platform brings.

If you are interested in gaining access to Google Wave, let me know. I only have a few invitations, so please be sincere in your desire to be part of the extended working group.

Can we get more people to choose the stairs by making it fun to do?

The following 2-minute video shows what the team did to create “fun” stairs.

Did it work? If you watched the time-lapsed video you saw the change. By making the stairs fun, 66% more people used the stairs instead of the escalator. What I found the most interesting is what was missing. Did you catch it? There were no signs, no banners, no messages of any kind. The only clues were the visual of the stairs looking like a piano and the sound.

Simply by creating a little fun with stairs they changed behavior. No meetings, no informational campaign–no advance messaging of any kind.

My challenge to you is this…put a little fun in your learning. See if you can make change fun instead of frightening. The results may surprise you.

For those of us who come from a technology background, it is tempting to believe that the purchase of a knowledge management (KM) system will solve the problems our organizations face by capturing the knowledge from our best and brightest employees. After all, if a computer that’s coupled with a database and connected to the Internet cannot capture information, retain it, and enable rapid retrieval, what can? This is the message we hear from the purveyors of KM solutions.

Though selecting the appropriate software is just as important for implementing KM within an organization as it is for any other project, there is far more to a successful KM initiative than what happens within the IT department. Before software selection is even considered, certain areas of the business must be evaluated. The successful execution of a KM initiative requires support from the CEO and the rest of the C-level executives.

If your organization decides to embark upon a KM initiative, there are a few things you need to know so that you are not caught off guard when the project is launched. You need to know what knowledge is, how it is captured, what interferes with the sharing of knowledge, how knowledge is shared, and how it can be maintained…  Read the full article at MC Press Online.

This article was written in 2004 for MC Press for IT Professionals.

By David Hildebrandt

A Trusted Advisor

The end-state of employee advocacy is often described as being a trusted advisor to the executive team he or she supports.  Yet it becomes difficult to describe just how an employee advocate moves from being viewed with uncertainty, or even suspicion, to a position of trust.  Being trusted does not make one an advisor, let alone one that is trusted.  May (2004) stated that “while the consultant greatly underestimates the importance of trust by assuming it comes from simply providing excellent and reliable service, the [employee advocate] knows that mistrust to any degree will undermine his or her efforts, and that extraordinary personal action is required to build and maintain trustworthiness. (p. 18)” May (2004) goes on to define trust as “the belief that those upon whom we rely will realistically fulfill our positive expectations of them” (p. 18).

To be a trusted advisor, we must first be trustworthy—that while we seek to become trusted we must also extend our own trust to others while working, to extinguish any behavior that has the appearance evil (May, 2004; Urban, 2005).  We must not allow a seed of mistrust to be planted, and if a seed of mistrust is found, we must immediately eradicate it…

To read the entire white paper download the following file:

BecomingATrustedAdvisor_EmployeeAdvocacy.pdf