Online Conferences and In-Person Conferences

Lisa Neal asked a great question in a comment on Learn Trends 2008 - Free Online Conference:

What do you see as the main differences between in person and online conferences?

I have a bunch of random thoughts on this and I'm hoping that folks will chime in. First let me start with a couple of predictions:

Prediction 1 - Online only conferences will rapidly increase and will slow down in-person conferences

Prediction 2 - Smaller, targeted, short-burst, rapidly planned conferences will emerge.

Now, don't get me wrong, I still very much like to do in-person conferences. I believe Face to Face Still Matters. I very much am looking forward to attending both DevLearn in a couple of weeks.

That said, the fact that George, Jay and I can pull together an online only, free workshop just through a bit of elbow grease and get 2,000 people to come tells me that we will see more of this in the future. The tools are there to make these things happen. Ning really makes it easy to do one of these. Or you could do it as a Facebook group. You can add a Wiki or Aggregator or other things to make this a bit better. But really, when you think about what you do at an in-person conference:

• Attend Sessions
• Go to the Expo
  
• Have Discussions - some random topics with random people
• Have Drinks, Dinner

The first three have direct online equivalents. We are not doing an online expo in our conference, but I'm thinking that will be next year.

On discussions, I believe that it's harder to have effective discussions on specific topics at in-person conferences. Threaded discussions are more effective and normally you don't have these in-person. You do get a better random effect in-person. You sit at a table with people at meals and get into conversations on all sorts of topics.

A couple of big advantages jump out around online conferences:

• Online conferences have a dramatically lower cost in terms of time and expense. It's hard to get all the way to an in-person conference. I've had to lower the number I attend.
• Online conferences allow recording of sessions so that you can participate even if you can't do it real-time.

I do think most people will "attend" an online conference quite differently. They won't leave work for the week. This will be a part time thing. We generally schedule making that assumption. Only use half the day. Don't try to pack too much in.

In-person conferences have an advantage of getting more attention from the attendees. I actually think that in-person deserves more. People still spend lots of time and money going in-person and not doing the things it takes to really be prepared: Be an Insanely Great Professional Conference Attendee, Conference Preparation and Better Questions for Learning Professionals. Online will suffer more than in-person from lack of preparation.

The flip side is that online can provide time to get people prepared during the conference. Have someone spend part of the time thinking about what they really need. Post that as questions in the discussions. So, while you get more attention in-person, you have more time online.

Given the dramatically different cost/time structures, I don't see how online conferences can do anything but increase.

Does that mean a decrease of in-person? Yes. If the sessions you are interested in are being offerred online, will you still go to the in-person? Maybe, but it certainly makes you question it. With the economic downturn - my bets are tough times for the next 24 months of in-person conferences.

I'm also predicting that we will see more impromptu online conferences. If several people were interested in a topic, they can easily pull together a few speakers, create a ning group and set up a quick conference. They can advertise through social media. Cost is very low. And the topics can be targeted. Really, I'm not sure that a week long event that we've designed is the model to use. I love the list of speakers, but we could have made this 5, 2 day conferences. Or randomly spersed two day conferences. Or even a week long - session - discussion - session type thing.

Because of the impromptu nature, you can be much deeply focused. In-person conferences and even larger online conferences have a tendency to focus more broadly in order to appeal to a large audience. Impromptu conferences want to attract an audience, but it probably is better to have it smaller.

Once you go online, you have a lot more options. As an in-person conference organizer, you really have challenges trying to pack everything you can in that week. You also have a cost basis that's completely different.

I actually think this is also going to impact local events. Here in Los Angeles, you may have to drive 45-90 minutes to get to a local event. Most often the topics again have to be broader. ASTD Los Angeles' special interest groups (SIGs) are trying to figure out what it means when they start doing online sessions that are potentially available worldwide. In many ways, attracting a broader audience makes the sessions more interesting. But what does that do to local?

Actually as I've been writing this, my feeling is that there are going to be new types of financial models and businesses emerging from this dynamic. I just had an idea for a new business.

I'll be curious what people think of the topic more generally ....

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Develop Work Skills

Stuart Henshall had asked on Twitter about ideas for posts. I sent him a reply and asked for his thoughts on my post New Work. He took me up on it and created quite an interesting reply. It sparked quite a few thoughts for me.

The element that really resonated with me is the adhoc nature / the real-time learning that we do today. I also sense that it’s in no way the same for everyone. Eg some can ask questions and harness a network. Others can hit Google up and find things you never could. Then others are already tracking and writing about it and you can just talk or write to them.

This is absolutely true that people have greatly different abilities in different areas. There are also several studies of knowledge worker practices that suggest that a lot of what is effective is quite personal. That said, I think there is a tendency to lean on the skills that we are good at and not use other approaches when they are called for. If you are really good at searching on Google, then you may not leverage your network even when it's very much called for.

When someone is seeking to learn about anything (learning task) it’s usually more efficient again to go outside the organization. The employee goes to Google, dives into Wikipedia and other open source efforts. Wherever these communities of experts are active and committed to sharing, things happen. It often doesn’t happen inside the corporate information system and even if it was captured somewhere, few organizations have a way to extract it. That’s a problem for both learning and the corporate experts. This learning only adds to competitive advantage when assimilated. Assimilation of new information is a huge problem in most organizations. Let’s face it organizations that learn faster win. Those that learn faster at lower cost win even more. Those that enable the acceleration of learning outside and around the organization get even better leverage on learning.

Great points. It's always interesting to hear the perspective of someone with a background in Knowledge Management discussing these things. They immediately go from individual learning to organizational learning. How can the organization capture the knowledge, learning, etc.? Certainly helping to make it a natural part of work-flow to capture information in a way that helps the individual and the organization is the key. Social bookmarking, searching browsing trails, capture of communications as clues to expertise. Even with that I wonder if you can really be successful trying to get these artifacts to do more than signal learning in some area occurred within the organization. Further, it feels strange that we say that most of the information / expertise is going to come from outside the organization - yet we are trying to capture back into the organization?

All of the above personalize the learning experience. I’m always bothered by eLearning. Smacks of tick boxes on computerized tests to me. I don’t think the new work is about tests. ... It is more about agility and flexibility. If we want to teach new work we should embed more in complexity theory. Rather than content which we are swamped in, what we lack today is interpretive insight and meaning.

I have no idea what Stuart means when he says we should teach new work via "complexity theory" - but the comment that creating more content may not be the answer - ever. Of course, much of what learning professionals see as their roll is to create content.

That said - I really wonder how you teach the new work. To me, it IS partly content. But a lot of it is creating experiences and opportunities that are part of work. Sitting beside the worker is ideal - but scaling that can be a problem. So, maybe it's work buddies. Find someone who is good at using outside expertise in the form of people and have that person help you build that skill.

I think my question to Tony is - Are you sure that it is formal learning programs that are required. Or should the organization be more effective at facilitating questions that force the organization to learn?

Stuart - no I'm not sure - but I see this gap in skills and I don't see organizations doing what they need to do to close that gap. I believe formal learning can be used for part of this - and certainly I've done that myself. But, when it comes to really learning this and applying it - formal doesn't work.

I honestly am not sure I get Stuart's suggestion that facilitating questions is the key. I am a big believer in asking better questions. And there are some key questions that organizations need to be asking here. But, we need more than questions, we need acceptance of responsibility and action.

He asks if our work skills are keeping up. As he suggests I must be as I did get this post off Twitter and visited his blog. So we probably are alright.

This is the crux of the problem for me right now. I believe the skills gap is big and growing. I also think a lot of people are ignoring it. This will hurt them greatly as knowledge workers going forward and hurt their organizations who will have marginal learner workers.

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Learn Trends 2008 - Free

George Siemens, Jay Cross and Tony Karrer have organized the second annual free online conference:

Corporate Learning: Trends and Innovation 2008

November 17 - 21, 2008 | Online | Free

Last year's conference had two thousand people from all over the world take part in the week-long conference. This year the conference has an incredible set of speakers and lots of opportunities to discuss the issues. Speakers and topics include:

• Alvaro Fernandez: Brain Fitness for Peak Health and Performance
• Dave Gray: Visual Literacy, Learning Innovation
• Kevin Wheeler: The Future of Talent
• Dave Pollard - Working Smarter: Improving the personal productivity of knowledge workers.
• Dave Wilkins - The Amazon Model and Forum Model - the intersection of LMS and Learning 2.0
• Jane Hart - 25 Free Tools Every Learning Professional Should Have in their Toolbox
• Mark Sylvester - Social Networking as a Strategic Part of Your Learning Strategy
• Nancy White - Online Social Architectures - Networks and Communities
• Robin Good - Best Online Collaboration Tools for Learning
• Tony Karrer - Work Literacy - Implications for Learning Professionals
• Jay Cross, Jane Hart, Harold Jarche, and Clark Quinn: Learnscape Sandbox
• Marcia Conner and Jon Husband: ROI of Web Learning
• Allison Anderson: Corporate Learning Ecology

The conference runs November 17-2008. It's online. And it's free. If you want to attend sign up and follow the conference blog: LearnTrends for on-going updates.

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Getting Help

My post New Work is about changes in work skills. One of the bigger changes in work skills have to do with getting help. I looked at a couple examples this recently in LinkedIn for Finding Expertise and Searching for Expertise - LinkedIn Answers

This topic came up again in a discussion - Blogging to ask for Help - Colin asked:

If you need input from like-minded people around the world, where's the best place to ask?

Today I posted a request for reader input in my blog because I didn't know where else I could ask for help from people outside my company. Is there a more effective way to approach this kind of problem?

There's some interesting discussion in the thread around whether it makes sense to post a question in a blog. And some alternative places were suggested for getting help. Some suggestions:

• Discussion groups (TrDev, ???)
• Ning or LinkedIn Groups
  
• LinkedIn to find individuals
• LinkedIn to ask questions - via Answers
  
• Twitter (only if you've participated quite a bit)

The issue with Twitter and posting questions through a blog is that you only will get responses from your existing audience.

Am I missing any options here for getting help?

Are there good resources for helping someone know how to use these things to get help?

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New Work and New Work Skills

My recent Survey - Do You Know What These Are? really was all about new work skills - skills we should be learning. Actually, it's also about the fact that there's not really new work as much as there is new work skills. More on this below. I showed these two pictures:



and asked survey takers to answer the following questions:

1) What's your age
* Under 18
* 18 - 26
* 27 - 42
* 43+

2) What is in picture 1
# Not sure
# Know the name of this
# Know how it's organized
# Have used it

3) What is in picture 2
# Not sure
# Know it's name
# Know how it's used
# Have used one

The results are no surprise and were fully anticipated with comments such as:

I haven't used either for several years now.

I don't think I've used one of those since I was at college for the first go-round (80-82)!

I'm under 25 and have used both... assuming by "used" you mean converting the first into shelving for my CDs.

Who still uses CD's? ;)

While I would not claim the survey is scientific, I think the results were quite predictable. I received over 350 responses with only 16 being people under 18 and 48 from people age 18-26.

For the Card Catalog - the percentage of people saying they were "not sure" -

• Under 18 – 71%
• 18 – 26 – 12%
• 27 – 42 – 3.5%
• 43+ - 2%

For the Microfiche Reader - the percentage of people saying they were "not sure" -

• Under 18 – 44%
• 18 – 26 – 30%
• 27 – 42 – 7%
• 43+ - 4%

Note: 43+ Baby Boomer (or older), 27-42 - Gen X, Under 27 - Millennial (Gen Y).

I'm actually think that many of the under 27 people who said they knew what it was - thought it was an old computer.

Work Skills Changing

Most of us who used to use these things know somewhat know that they really aren't in use anymore. When I did a presentation in Cincinnati, someone in the audience was from OCLC. He told me that they used to ship truck loads of cards to libraries every day. Now, they can print them using one laser printer. It was quite a while ago when libraries began to put signs on card catalogs telling patrons that they are no longer updating them.

We all know this right?

But are we thinking about the implications?

In presentations, I often will cite this as an example of the kinds of changes in work skills that have occurred and are constantly occurring. A big part of education is learning how to do research and really that's where you learn the foundations of knowledge work.

If you attended college and used a card catalog and microfiche reader, then you very likely were basically taught how to operate when it was hard to find information. Finding content was the biggest challenge. If you were assigned a paper and could choose among some specific topics, you often chose the topic based on what you could find information on. I remember often changing topics when I couldn't find enough detail on it in the library.

Do you remember that feeling of euphoria when you found some content?

For me, this makes me think of my senior year of college. I was part of a team that was working on building a computer player for the game of Othello. Because it was a competition (each team's algorithm would play at the end of the year), I wanted to make sure that my algorithm was really good. I happened to be going on a trip to Washington DC to some kind of meeting for Tau Beta Pi (the engineering honor society). On that trip, while other engineers were over at the Smithsonian, I visited the Library of Congress and found this incredible book that had some great descriptions of strategies to win in Othello.

By the way, while this story may implicate me as a complete and total nerd on several levels, I must say in my defense that I also was part of a small group that managed to get help from a local fraternity to fill a bathtub full of beer to share with my fellow engineers as well as was able to get to Georgetown for Halloween.

Still, the point here is that many of us were taught how scarce and precious information was.

Contrast this with a A Fourth Grader Wikipedia Update. My kids face the problem of having too much information and having to learn how to filter.

And, it's not just access to information that's changed. You were also taught or learned:

• Taking notes on paper
• Optimizing use of the library copy machine (actually I believe we called it a Xerox machine at the time) to make copies of pages of books that you would take with you. This cost significant dollars and time. So you definitely figured out what worked here.

and many other things that were artifacts of the time.

Think about how much has changed:

• PC
• Laptop
• PDA
• Cell Phone
• Wireless
• 3G
  
• Access to Trillions of Pages of content
• Access to Millions (Billions) of People
• Access to Tens of Thousands of Information Services

Are Our Work Skills Keeping Up?

Most people I know have not participated in formal learning since college on foundational knowledge work skills. That's really the last time that someone (a teacher) taught you how to do these things. But, if you learned using card catalogs, microfiche readers, Xerox machines, libraries, etc. then what has taught you new skills?

• How to take notes on a laptop, PC?
• How to work with mobile devices and keep them in sync?
• How to effectively filter?
• How to reach out and find expertise?
• How to use Social Media to Find Answers to Anything?
• How to Learn through Conversation?
• How to keep track, organize, refind, remind of information?
  

and the list goes on.

Of course, if you are reading this post (and it's still roughly Oct/Nov 2008), then likely you are a bit ahead of the average knowledge worker. So, maybe you are okay? Well consider the following:

• I effectively use the Google filetype operator?
  
• I know what does the Google "~" operator does?
• I'm effective at reaching out to get help from people I don't already know
• I'm good at keeping, organizing my documents, web pages that I've encountered in ways that allow me to find it again when I need it and remind me that it exists when I'm not sure what I'm looking for.
• I'm good at filtering information.
• I'm good at collaboratively working with virtual work teams and use Google Docs or a Wiki as appropriate in these situations
  

My strong belief is that the foundations of knowledge work are changing fairly quickly and most of us learn completely through ad hoc mechanisms that are not likely to yield good coverage. If you could have an expert look over your shoulder at how you do things on a day-to-day basis, you likely could find many improvements. Virtually every one of us would be somewhat embarrassed to have that expert sitting there because we know (in our guts) that we could stand to do things better.

But most of us are not going to have that expert come in to help us. So, instead we are left to our own devices to learn these things. And because this information is horribly scattered and because it's hard to keep up with the pace of change -

Every knowledge worker could use help to improve their foundational knowledge work skills.

Part of the reason that this new work has snuck up on us is that much appears the same. I discussed this back in Have Work and Learning Changed or the Way We Do Work and Learning? My conclusion out of those discussions is that there's not really new work. However, the environment is quite different and this is the reason that these changes have somewhat snuck up on us.

All of this is the foundation of our work on Work Literacy.

I look forward to your thoughts.

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ASTD TechKnowledge - DevLearn Conference

I just received a question that I'm sure often is on the minds of people in eLearning - which conference they should attend (eLearning Guild DevLearn or ASTD TechKnowledge). I'm hoping that everyone can weigh in on their thoughts. Here's was the specific question (and all the information I have to go on) to help advise this person -

I have been trying to decide whether to attend DevLearn 2008 or ASTD TechKnowledge in 2009. I have never attended either. I have been designing and developing elearning for about a year. Any suggestions?

This person works in health care in employee learning and organizational development.

So, which would you choose and for what reasons?

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eBay - eLearning 2.0 and Formal Learning

I presented at an eLearningGuild online symposium a couple weeks ago. The topic of the symposium was eLearning 2.0 (or is it Learning 2.0). This presentation is where the
Examples of eLearning 2.0 - which showed clearly these things are being applied to formal and informal learning opportunities.

One of the other presentations of the day was This Isn’t your Mama’s Training:
Implementing Learning 2.0 at eBay by Eric Hunter & Rich Reitter of eBay. A lot of what they presented, I wouldn't consider new, but I thought that they had really done a good job pulling things together to make sense of them. For example, they used the following Learning Map to describe a learning experience:



I'm sure you've seen these sorts of learning maps before. They have various check points that require completion to achieve certification. These certifications require the activities to have been performed and tests to be passed.

However, along the way you are participating in lots of online activities that are kept in wiki pages, blog posts, podcasts, web pages, discussion boards, etc. Interesting use of various Training Methods. They don't really discuss these as eLearning 2.0, but rather as a natural part of the Learning Plan. However, because of these tools they are more likely to get SMEs to update content and quickly update it for multiple groups of learners.

A smart example of using eLearning 2.0 alongside formal learning.

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