News Clips

The Displacement Hypothesis says that one activity can displace another activity.

In the following research by Robert Weis and Brittany Cerankosky, boys given video games (1) did worse in school, (2) spent less time in other after-school activities, (3) had more behavioral problems, and (4) had lower reading and writing scores.

Abstract of the Research Article:

Young boys who did not own video games were promised a video-game system and child-appropriate games in exchange for participating in an “ongoing study of child development.” After baseline assessment of boys’ academic achievement and parent- and teacher-reported behavior, boys were randomly assigned to receive the video-game system immediately or to receive the video-game system after follow-up assessment, 4 months later. Boys who received the system immediately spent more time playing video games and less time engaged in after-school academic activities than comparison children. Boys who received the system immediately also had lower reading and writing scores and greater teacher-reported academic problems at follow-up than comparison children. Amount of video-game play mediated the relationship between video-game ownership and academic outcomes. Results provide experimental evidence that video games may displace after-school activities that have educational value and may interfere with the development of reading and writing skills in some children.

Analogs in Adult Learning

Are there analogs in adult learning? In a quick database review I couldn't uncover any research on the displacement hypothesis with adults, but here are some learning events that may displace other learning events:

1. Twitter
2. Social Networking
3. Web Surfing
4. Blogs
5. RSS following
6. Gaming

Postscript:

When I asked the lead author if he knew of any studies on adults regarding the displacement hypothesis, he said "no," but he pointed me to this article on college students.

Cammy Bean interviews me in regard to the three most important e-learning design flaws in today's e-learning. I discussed three---and then two more!! Five design flaws in all.

How's your e-learning?

Check out the interview here.

You can also download the segments as podcasts.

As part of the Big Question this month Open Content in Workplace Learning?, I’m exploring whether Open Content can be used by for-profit companies.  And, since Open Content comes in under the Creative Commons license structure.  Actually, I’m curious if Open Content ever is not Creative Commons?  It’s by definition Open, but theoretically you could choose a different open license. I’ve just never seen it.

In any case, to understand the use of Open Content, it’s important to understand Creative Commons licensing.

Creative Commons Licensing Terms

Creative Commons licensing terms.  All CC licenses start with:

• Attribution (CC-BY) – Allows others to copy, distribute, display and perform a copyrighted work – and derivative
  works based upon it – but only if they give credit. All CC licenses contain this condition.

Licenses may have one or more of the following permissions or restrictions:

• Non-Commercial (NC) - Allows copy, distribute, display and perform a work – and derivative works
  based upon it – but for non-commercial purposes only.
• Share Alike (SA) - Allows others to distribute derivative works but only only under the same conditions as the original license.
• No Derivative Works (ND) – Allows copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of the work, but not make derivative works based on it.

These get combined into one of six licenses:

• Attribution (CC-BY)
• Attribution Share Alike (CC-BY-SA)
• Attribution No Derivatives (CC-BY-ND)
• Attribution Non-Commercial (CC-BY-NC)
• Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike (CC-BY-NC-SA)
• Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)

Licenses on Open Content

I took a bit of a sampling of various sources of content found via the OER Commons and from the OCW Consortium:

• SERC – CC-BY-NC-SA
• Learn NC – CC-BY-NC-SA
• MIT OpenCourseWare – CC-BY-NC-SA
• Utah State OpenCourseWare – CC-BY-NC-SA, but some specific courses such as Intro to Instructional Design has a CC-BY-SA
• Johns Hopkins OCW - CC-BY-NC-SA
• Notre Dame - CC-BY-NC-SA
• The Open University – CC-BY-NC-SA

There’s a definite pattern here.  Most of the OCW content appears to come under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence.  There were a few exceptions such as Stanford Engineering Everywhere with a CC-BY license.

But, I think this really turns into a question of the implications of CC-BY-NC-SA.

Implications of Noncommercial Use

Creative Commons noncommercial licenses disallow “commercial use” – i.e., they preclude the use:

… in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation.

From what I’ve read, it’s intentionally fuzzy what this exactly means and I am by no means an expert (or a lawyer) around this stuff.

Creative Commons themselves conducted a study to understand commonly held interpretation of this definition – which is itself important from a practical standpoint.

The study itself tells us that people generally consider the following unacceptable:

• Promotional use (advertising)
• Use makes money

Perception is that greater scrutiny is required as you move from:

• Private or individual,
• Charitable or social good,
• Non-profit,
• For-profit

In other words, generally use by an individual (i.e., self-study is considered okay).  If it’s for a charity, social good or non-profit, you are generally safe if you are not making direct revenue / donations from it.

I interpret that putting up links as a means for employees to access the content themselves would generally be considered safe.  I would be curious if anyone disagrees with this.  Of course, you can always find a corporate attorney who doesn’t want to do that even, but you probably can’t access common websites from that company either.

Here’s the tricky questions.  Maybe there are clear cut answers, I just don’t know what they are. 

What if I want to use the course content or part of the course content to teach employees or partners behind the firewall.  Is that commercial use?

A question from the study:

“Work would be used by a for-profit company, but no money would be made”

• Definitely commercial - ~33%
• Can’t say - ~40%
• Definitely noncommercial - ~27%

Shows that people are generally split on the question of whether the scenario I describe is considered commercial or noncommercial.  So it’s a bit of a gray area.  And likely it’s even fuzzier based on whether you are linking, copying, modifying, etc.

Any thoughts on the practical answer here?  If I want to create eLearning for use by my employees, can I use CC-BY-NC content as part of it?  Under what conditions?

Implications of Share Alike

Share Alike has some interesting challenges in interpretation for this situation as well.  From the Creative Commons FAQ:

If you are combining a work licensed under a ShareAlike license condition, you need to make sure that you are happy and able to license the resulting work under the same license conditions as the original work.

This suggests that if you use ShareAlike licensed materials in a course for your employees, then the resulting work must be licensed the same way. 

There’s a lot of gray around this as well.  First, likely the course is being provided only behind your firewall.  There’s nothing specifically that I can see that says you have to distribute the resulting work or make it widely available.  However, there is a clause that causes a bit of concern:

You may not impose any effective technological measures on the Work that restrict the ability of a recipient of the Work from You to exercise the rights granted to that recipient under the terms of the License.

Of course, the license would allow anyone with access to the work to distribute it themselves.  Thus, an employee could theoretically make a copy and distribute it.  Doubtful that an employee would do this, but since it would be consistent with the license, I’m not sure you could pursue.

In practice, I’m pretty sure you would want to approach the use of this content a bit differently.  If you are taking ShareAlike content and either using a subset or modifying it, you might just want to create a derivative work that is ShareAlike on its own.  It can be fully redistributed, and you wouldn’t care.  Then you can link to that work within your broader course.

It’s somewhat a loose coupling of content, but it is consistent with the spirit of the ShareAlike license.  Create new, public works based on the original work.  Don’t put stuff in that new work that is specific to your organization that you don’t want shared.  That creates a new ShareAlike work.  And you can link to a public instance of that.

If you think about it, having a large collection of these smaller chunks that could be used by employees probably could provide value to others.

Question for Images and Other Content

Of course this same question comes up about a whole lot of other content.  For example, Flickr provides access to images according to Creative Commons license.  See Flickr Creative Commons.  The images under the Attribution license obviously give you a fair bit of freedom to use in your eLearning.  How about those under Noncommercial?  Can you put one of those images inside your internal corporate training as long as you provide attribution?

It’s really the same question as the noncommercial use as described above.

ShareAlike would seem to be a bit problematic for images.  You are very likely using it as a copy inside the course.  Doesn’t that run you into the problem described above?

Help

Again, I’m by no means an expert on this stuff, nor an attorney.  But what would be good is to have some people who know more about this weigh in with help on how to proceed.

I’m also curious to find out what corporate attorneys are deciding around this?

eLearning Technology
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The Market Financial
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The March Big Question on the Learning Circuits Blog asks why it is that open content initiatives such as the OER Commons and the Open Courseware Consortium haven't had a bigger impact. I have some suggestions:

• There is no history or culture of content sharing in workplace learning and development. Most l&d departments operate in glorious isolation and would probably never consider engaging with their peers to share learning content. There are, of course, exceptions and associations can play a valuable role in identifying common needs across a vertical or horizontal market sector and helping to centralise efforts to create new content. A good example is Learning Pool, which creates e-learning content for sharing across local government in the UK and helps to ensure that content developed in the field is distributed more widely. This is not a free service, but it does reduce the costs to any one local authority significantly.
• L&d people may simply never get to hear about the free resources available because these are not advertised in magazines or shown at exhibitions.
• Social media will not fill the dissemination gap, because most l&d people don't use them, at least not for professional purposes.
• And we should never forget the power of the 'not invented here' syndrome.

I nearly forgot to mention another exception to the rule that's so close to home I couldn't focus on it - the 60-minute masters. This resource for occasional instructional designers was created collaboratively under a Creative Commons license. The resulting short course has been taken by many thousands of designers around the world. The content can be freely adapted and distributed in any form, as long as it is not sold on commercially. Perhaps we could have more projects like this.

Pakrati.us = Twitter + Delicious.  Find out more in my posting on Social Media in Learning

Latitude to Demonstrate LatitudeLearning.com, its Open-Source LMS at Learning ...
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Since 2002, the eLearning Guild's annual gathering has been the preeminent resource for e-Learning professionals, attracting leaders in the industry. ...

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Caspian Learning, developer of Thinking Worlds, a commercial software platform that enables the rapid development of 3D immersive learning simulations and serious games, has announced plans to launch their first Serious Games Challenge.

The challenge will pit instructional designers of all experience levels against each other in a 30 day Serious Games Challenge to create the most innovative learning simulation using drag and drop Thinking Worlds technology.

The Serious Games Challenge will be launched from Caspian Learning’s ‘Experience Lounge’ exhibition stand at the Game Based Learning conference on 28th March 2010. The £3000 Serious Games Challenge will be open to everyone, whether individual or corporate, and will last for 30 days. Entries will be valid until the 30th April, at which time, Caspian Learning’s design team will select a winner from the entries.

The winner will be the designer (or team) that submits the most innovative 3d learning, training or performance simulation by the 30th April 2010. The winner of the challenge will also receive a licensed copy of Thinking Worlds Standard, worth £2999.

To take part in the 30 Day Serious Games Challenge, all you need to do is download a free trial copy of Thinking Worlds and submit your entries by April 30th, 30 days after the Experience Lounge launch. Download your free trial from the following  http://www.thinkingworlds.com 

Are you dreaming of an immersive simulation while your team members plan yet another Jeopardy game? If you want stakeholders to expand their horizons, a working prototype is your best friend.

A working prototype has simple placeholder graphics, but the clicking and dragging work as they will in the final activity. Build a quick-and-dirty version of the activity of your dreams, and use it to convert everyone on your team.

Here’s a two-part video that shows what I mean. Leif Cederblom of SmartBuilder compares two prototypes of the same activity and highlights the goals and benefits of prototyping.

Part 1: The conventional drag-and-drop: busywork that’s easy to forget

Part 2: A more realistic activity that’s more likely to change behavior

Try both prototypes yourself and see how the contrast between the two underscores the power of the more realistic activity. No amount of polish would make the drag-and-drop more than a rote activity, while the “leave the lab” prototype is effective even in its raw, prototype form.

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On March 4, the W3C published no less than seven new or updated working draft documents related to HTML:

• HTML5
• HTML: The Markup Language
• HTML5 differences from HTML4
• HTML+RDFa
• HTML Microdata
• HTML Canvas 2D Context
• Additional Requirements for Bidi in HTML

Read full post

Posted in (X)HTML, HTML 5.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently published its Occupational Outlook for 2018 (the next 10 years) and it is well worth reading.  This data, coupled with a number of meetings I”ve had recently with HR and L&D executives, clearly tells me that we are about to re-enter a new “war for talent.”

This phrase has been thrown around for years, so many of us have become somewhat dulled to the concept.  But this time I think it warrants serious consideration for any HR or L&D leader.   I will be presenting some new thoughts on this subject in my IMPACT 2010® keynote in April, but meanwhile here are some things to think about.

Age:

In the next ten years the US workforce is going to decline in size (relative to the population) and greatly age.  The percent of workers over 55 will grow by over 30%, yet the percent who are 30 and below will be flat.  This means that every single organization (of any size), is going to become squeezed by the eventual retirement of the baby boomers and the need to compete for young professionals and managers.

There are many implications to this, which I will discuss during my speech:  we are going to need completely new recruiting strategies (and global organizations must now recruit from “younger” countries), we must develop highly effective “authentic” recruiting models to attract the right people, and we must revamp leadership development to lean much more heavily toward people in their 30s.  I will be detailing these practices and many examples at IMPACT.

Lockheed Martin, for example, expects to need 250,000 more technical professionals over this period of time.  Think about the challenges this creates in all areas of HR and talent management.

Diversity:

I live in Oakland, California so I am very aware of the diversity of our future workforce.  The data spells it out very clearly:  in 2018 the US working population will be 35% more Hispanic, 25% more Asian and other non-caucasian races, and 8% less caucasian.  Every workgroup, team, and leadership pool will be far more diverse than today.  This means that diversity must be included s in our talent management strategy, not in some “compliance group” in the organization.

We have many examples where diversity is critical to business success.  Textron found that higher performing engineering and service teams are more diverse.  Healthcare organizations are mandated to meet diversity targets and measure them by JHACO (the compliance and certification authority).   Retailers must focus on diversity because their potential workforce is diverse and their customers demand diversity in products and service.  And manufacturers now realize that a diverse workforce builds skills and capabilities in market understanding which they need to succeed.  Take your talent management strategy and add “diversity” to the mix (our new Talent Management framework will discuss this in detail).

Under and Un-skilled:

Sadly, all the data I can find shows that the US educational system has now hit the wall.   More than 30% of the employers studied in a recent report by ASTD state that their new college graduates do not have the basic skills to enter their workforce without some form of remediation.  Typical skills they need include communication, critical thinking, self-learning, and writing.

The occupational forecast data shows that the three fastest growing occupation areas for the next 10 years are healthcare, technical and professional roles, and service.  The first two, which make up almost 75% of all of the job growth in the coming 8 years, require education and training.  Yet today more than 1 in 5 high school graduates drop out.  In my area the numbers are even higher.

California’s education system is so broken that we just had a group of rioting protesters shut down the 880 freeway (the main artery between San Francisco and San Jose) to protest the lack of funding.  The elementary school in my neighborhood just sprouted a wall of beautiful pictures, drawn by the grade schoolers, asking for more funding to make their school a better place.

We, as employers, are just going to have to deal with this and spend more time and money on remedial training, basic skills development, and partnerships with local universities and community colleges.  One of the programs I’m going to talk about at IMPACT is Northrop Grumman’s apprenticeship program with local colleges, which has dramatically improved their ability to hire ready technical people.  Healthcare providers have done this for years – and we all have to plan for this kind of training in the future.

Youth Oriented:  Looking for Leadership and Empowerment:

Finally, the data also shows that as the “changing of the guard” takes place in our organizations (turning over the reigns from baby boomer leaders to Generation X staff in their 30s and 40s), we must also change our attitudes a bit.  Data from Chevron and other clients we have interviewed shows that the turnover rate among workers under 30 is nearly twice the turnover of older workers.  I do not believe this is because they are fundamentally different – rather I think our organizations have become too “old-oriented.”

As a company ages in population, the types of programs, culture, activities, and communications target the needs of older workers.  Young people, who crave interesting developmental assignments, open communications forums, social activities, development, mentoring, and lots of culture-building programs which make work an enjoyable and gratifying experience.  As we get older and have families we focus more on benefits, stability, progression, and other needs.  We need to “youngify” the workplace we create.  (I know that’s not a word.)

A New Set of Challenges

This kind of discussion is not new, but it is now becoming urgent.   With the economy starting to grow, these issues are back on the table – I will be discussing them in detail at our upcoming research conference, please come join us…

CompTIA Introduces eLearning Courses for Technology Skills
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In a couple of previous postings in December 2009, I mentioned that the real-time collaborative authoring tool, Etherpad, had been acquired by Google to become part of Wave, and then that Etherpad had been opensourced.

Chris Pirillo and Jake Warner have now "frozen the Etherpad code in time" and released it as Type With Me. 

TypeWith.Me

[180+ Document and Presentation Tools in Learning Directory 2010]

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