Learning from mistakes

I subscribe to trainingzone and find some of their articles useful, amid a sea of thinly-disguised sales promotions. A recent example of the useful stuff is the ‘the top 10 bad people managers’ by blogger Simon Kenny, who lists some great examples of mistaken behaviour by managers. (You need to register for trainingzone to view his blog.)

This sort of material reads well: it’s funny, so it sticks in the mind, and it can be a memorable way of highlighting good and bad practice. In a similar vein, one of my favourite management books is (was? it was published in 1992 and is now out of print) My Biggest Mistake, edited by Roger Trapp, a compilation of columns that originally appeared in the Independent On Sunday, contributed by many well-known business leaders of the time, including Richard Branson, John Harvey-Jones and Anita Roddick.

But we only learn from our mistakes if we realise that they are mistakes, and work out alternatives for next time around. It can be dangerous to highlight bad practice in case the bad way is the lesson that stays with the learners. This is the long-standing criticism of training videos by Video Arts and their imitators: people remember the bumbling incompetence shown by the likes of John Cleese and Rowan Atkinson, as these were the scenarios the videos often led with, but not the ‘right way’ solutions hastily tacked on to the end. Simon Kenny’s piece gets round this problem neatly by specifying the lesson learned after each of his ten howlers.

The most powerful variant of this, for me – and I’m drawing on my personal experience – is when I make the mistakes myself. I think we often realise we have made a mistake, but don’t quite know what to do about it, and how to avoid repeating the mistake. We need help. Coaches and mentors can be invaluable here, but another option is the anonymous internet discussion forum; unfortunately, even under the cloak of anonymity, I don’t find many people willing to open up about their mistakes. I’d be interested in suggestions for how to provoke this sort of contribution – a much tougher proposition than how to respond to them.

101

A few days ago, I delivered the manuscript of my new book, 101 Learning and Development Tools, so it’s perhaps fitting that this is my 101st blog post.

In researching the book, and asking for suggestions for tools, I found widespread misunderstanding of my intentions, and of the scope of the book. A colleague explained this phenomenon to me the other day, with reference to a quote from Henry Ford.

Apparently, when working on the idea of his groundbreaking, accessible motor cars for all, Ford eschewed asking prospective customers what they would want from him, reasoning that they would basically ask for a faster horse. The point being that it is often hard to articulate your needs, and especially to envision new solutions to those needs, when you don’t know what is possible; often we don’t know what we don’t know, and the need for a solution doesn’t become apparent until that solution becomes available, and a new market is formed.

I hope the need for my new book becomes apparent once it’s available – which won’t be until the Autumn of 2011, although it may be available for pre-order on Amazon by the end of summer.

In the meantime, may I take this opportunity to wish all my followers and readers the compliments of the season, and a peaceful and prosperous New Year.

Joyful

No, it’s not that it’s that time of year again. Joyful is the translation from the Greek Xerte (pronounced zertay), which is the name of the online course authoring tool my organisation has chosen.

Yesterday a group of us enjoyed basic training in the use of Xerte at our local JISC Regional Support Centre, and came away feeling assured that we’ve made the right choice.

As readers of my blog posts in July will recall, we’ve agonised over the choice of an authoring tool, and it’s taken almost as long to choose one as it did to establish our Moodle platform. We began by defining the criteria we wanted from an authoring tool, and plotted a matrix with these criteria on one axis and the range of possible tools along the other. This process enabled us to eliminate Lectora, Toolbook, eXe and Udutu, among others.

Xerte isn’t perfect – it doesn’t meet all our criteria – but then no other tool did either. However, we are confident of achieving a lot of what we want, and having the scope to develop more, and/or benefit from others developing Xerte further.

Now it’s time to move on and start creating some new content. I’ll let you know how we get on.

Are interns mugs?

What is an intern, or an internship? Is it training? Work experience? A student placement? Volunteering?

I’ve been looking at this recently, and I confess to some confusion. Some internships seem to be paid; some not. But where they’re not, is this just a form of exploitation, substituting a free or cheap intern for a fully-salaried employee? Or is it a legitimate way to gain entry to a new organisation or industry?

Wiktionary takes a narrow view. It offers two definitions, the first of “a student who works in order to gain experience in their chosen field” and the second a more specific definition for medical students. Dictionary.com takes a different view: “a person who works as an apprentice or trainee in an occupation or profession to gain practical experience, and sometimes also to satisfy legal or other requirements for being licensed or accepted professionally.” The Oxford English Dictionary goes for “a student or trainee who does a job to gain work experience or for a qualification”.

This question came up, for me, in the context of volunteering. It seems entirely reasonable to me that, just as people give their time freely to public, community or charitable organisations, to make a contribution and/or perhaps to gain useful knowledge or skills, and just as some professionals volunteer their time pro bono, so it may be that those seeking entry to a new career may offer their services free in return for the experience.

This is fine from the volunteer intern’s point of view, but if the organisation uses this as job substitution, perhaps even laying off paid staff to recruit unpaid interns, is this morally acceptable?

My half-formed opinion on this is that we need guidelines. A kind of code on internships. There’s a thorough review of what happens in various countries around the world at Wikipedia. And a provocative discussion forum at interns anonymous.

I’d welcome feedback. Is there a right way and a wrong way to organise and offer internships?

Glorified books?

Perhaps the biggest difficulty I find with e-learning is the narrow view most people still seem to have about it. I posted before about how I fear the term ‘e-learning’ is too contaminated – those who have used it and found it helpful are on board, but many others, some of whom have had a bad experience, some of whom have other prejudices, regard it as too toxic to contemplate.

I suppose this view partly reflects my own concern that, increasingly, the purely online course has limited applicability, and instead we should be looking at greater use of collaborative tools, and more ‘blending’ with offline learning.

To clarify further, what I’m saying is that an online course is typically such a passive experience that it’s really only good for acquisition of facts, figures and information, and at best the gaining of knowledge. A bit like a book, really, and increasingly it seems books are what online courses are competing with.

In the Moodle platform I’ve been using for most of the past year, a course authoring tool is actually called “the book module”. It’s basically recognising that all it’s offering is the creation of an online book. And with the development of more and better digital readers like the iPad, the Kindle and the Sony Reader, this sort of Web-based e-reading is going to look increasingly dated and limited.

We need more interactivity, and not just with automatic and dynamic applications that give the learner a sense of feedback, but with real people, connected through the many collaborative tools that are already commonplace. We need to take e-learning beyond being glorified books, into a place where genuine learning is happening.

Nail on head?

There’s a good column by Daniel Wain in the 11 November edition of People Management, the CIPD journal.

Daniel quotes Charles Elvin of the Open University saying “I am a business person who uses learning for business transformation, and not a learning person who hopes the business listens to me” and goes on to reason that HR professionals making the case for their interventions are approaching problems the wrong way around, “like a workman armed with a hammer looking for a nail to hit”.

I found these comments apposite as I am finalising the manuscript for my forthcoming book, 101 Learning & Development Tools. There’s a danger, in an anthology like that, that I offer a selection of hammers in search of nails. Thanks to Daniel’s timely reminder, I am ensuring that the emphasis in my book is firmly on identifying the business challenges first, before selecting the right tools to help tackle them.

I generally find Daniel Wain’s column pretty good, and I’ve been meaning to find something positive to say about it, since my only previous reference on this blog was to slag it off. I hope this redresses the balance.

Hiatus

It’s been a while since I last blogged – more than three months since my last blog post represents the longest hiatus since I started this blog in 2007. My apologies to any followers, commenters, or readers who may have been disappointed.

My excuses are threefold: my forthcoming book – working title 101 Learning & Development Tools – is approaching the deadline for submission of my final manuscript; my day-job has been very busy; and there’s a significant, albeit very positive, upheaval in my family life (sorry that’s a bit cryptic, but I’m only sharing with family and friends).

Anyway, distractions notwithstanding, I have resolved to get back into the habit, and try to resume my old rate of about two blog posts per month. I’m counting this one. I know that’s a bit of a cheat, but it’s my blog and I can do what I want.

Thanks for reading.

More to follow (I promise).