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May’s blogger has been a steadfast friend and contributor to ASTD. Allison Rossett is knowledgeable about needs analysis, technology-based learning, persistence and engagement in a world with increasing amounts of technology-based independent learning.Her official bio reads something like this: Dr. Allison Rossett, long-time Professor of Educational Technology at San Diego State University, is a consultant in learning and technology-based performance. A member of Training magazine’s HRD Hall of Fame, Allison serves on the Board for the Elearning Guild and Chief Learning Officer magazine. She was honored when ISPI selected her as a Member-for-Life and more recently when they bestowed the wonderful Thomas Gilbert Award on her. Allison served on the ASTD International Board and more recently received ASTD’s recognition for lifelong contributions to workplace learning and performance. Allison is the author or co-author of six books, several of them award-winners.Recently, ASTD designated Allison a LEGEND, and she writes on her blog that she is still stunned by the label. Really? I’m stunned that it didn’t happen sooner because Allison absolutely knows a lot about a lot of complex issues. More important, people like to hear what she has to say. When I’ve needed help understanding something, finding resources for Learning Circuits, or bouncing around ideas, she’s one of the first people I email. Her responses are not only always insightful, they’re sharp and fun to read.So, with ASTD International Conference & Expo this month, Justin and I wanted to invite a guest blogger who could cover a variety of topics. I instantly thought of Allison. Enjoy!

Introducing May Guest Blogger Allison Rossett

In January T+D, Allison Rossett and James Marshall report some surprising survey results on the state of e-learning---what it means today and where it's going in the near future. Shocker #1: Classroom learning is nowhere near death:"We collected practices associated with e-learning, from the most familiar, such as computers supporting face-to-face instruction inside classrooms, to more emergent modes that take learning and support into the workplace, encourage collaboration, and deliver using mobile devices. We then crafted 26 diverse e-learning "snapshots," piloted and edited them, and then made them widely available using SurveyMonkey.com, an online survey system. Five professional groups, including ASTD's Learning Circuits and the eLearning Guild, invited their members to weigh in on the snapshots..."If your view of e-learning hails from conferences, blogs, and magazines, you would think that the classroom is near death and that the web is the beating heart of training and development. Messages have gone mobile. Employees are empowered. Instructors are vestigial. Learning is blended, regularly occurring in classrooms and beyond, even in the workplace. And content flows from experts and users, too, in tasty, bite-sized morsels. But is that how it is?"Stay tuned for the January T+D for more on "how it is!"

Coming in January T+D: Allison Rossett's E-Learning Pulse Check

A letter to the editor is presented in response to an article on e-learning in the previous issue.

Where in the World Is Allison Rossett

February 2008 - TD Magazine

An interview with Allison Rossett, Professor of Educational Technology at San Diego State University

T+D Profiles Allison Rossett, Professor of Educational Technology at San Diego State University

Allison Rossett is professor emerita of educational technology at San Diego State University and has served on the International Board for ASTD. She blogs at www.allisonrossett.com

Allison Rossett

Patti Shank explores when and why performance support is often needed, and how performance support and training target different aspects of performance.

Science of Learning 101: When to Build Performance Support, Part 1

For leadership development to be successful, Howard Prager reminds talent development leaders that they need to consider several key elements.

A New Era Is Needed for Leadership Development

ATD Links Archive - ATD Links

This excerpt from TD at Work “Applying Learning Theory to Mobile Learning” looks at the drivers and barriers affecting mobile learning adoption.

Mobile Learning: Drivers and Barriers

Digital Writing for Learning and Performance— a one-unit courseAre you up-to-date in the field? Do you read professionally? Do you do it often? Do you do it efficiently? Do you know where to look for tasty morsels? Are you contributing yourself?Just a few more questions…. Do you know who Jane Hart is? How about George Siemens? Donald Taylor? Jane Bozarth? How about Tony Karrer and Juana Llorens? They all influence the field through blogs, content aggregation, tweets, and more. For example, Tony Karrer aggregates content, in addition to blogging himself. Juana has launched a lively instructional design online community that is attracting ASTD members and many others too.About two years ago, I noticed three things.I was not favoring my monthly magazines and journals as I once did. Collecting in a pile, they felt old and flabby when I finally got to them.I had this sense of things going on around and about me. Ideas, programs, and even apps were catapulted into the bloodstream of workplace learning and performance and I wasn’t tuning in to them- not in a dependable way. I wanted to weigh in. I was just as interested in the back and forth comments at the end of blog postings as I was in the original post. I started to add comments and enjoy responses to my comments. I was checking my twitter feed, sending out the occasional resource, and monitoring selected streams as eagerly as I followed the stock market and the San Diego Padres.It was time for me to devote real energy to this new way of being a professional.So I did. And I’m better, happier too, because of it. I blog and tweet. I monitor feeds. I participate in online communities. When I add content to the universe, reactions are immediate and often substantial. That old feeling I had about books and articles I’d written… wondering if they were read, appreciated and applied…. most of that concern is gone. I no longer feel as if I am tossing content into the Grand Canyon.Which brings me to a short, online course I will teach this Spring. It is called Digital Writing for Learning and Performance. Here are the five course outcomes:Review online resources associated with workplace learning and development and discover and share a dozen with meaning for you and your work;Make progress in building your own PLN (personal learning network), a set of resources to help you stay up to date in the field;Engage with others, classmates and others beyond our class, who produce content and host communities devoted to workplace learning and performance;Identify and research a topic that matters to you and offers benefits to others in the field of training and development; andCreate and submit content suitable for distribution online, in a resource we agree has the potential to be influential.The class will happen online. We commence on March 4th at 6 PM Pacific, and will meet online many, but not all, Monday evenings for an hour. The class concludes on May 13th.  Net, net, you will read and write and re-write and submit, supported by me, a teaching assistant, and your classmates. The underlying intention of the class is to increase familiarity and comfort with the delicious online resources that surround us.It costs $400 to register for the one-unit course.  You can enroll in the course here.In process is a 15% discount for ASTD members. Are you an international member? If you are, please complete this form so we can forward registration instructions.Interested? If you have any questions please drop them into the comments below. Thanks!

Digital Writing for Learning and Performance

I admit it. I love when people seek my opinion. That happened a lot in Denver, at ASTD 2012:I am entering the field. What do I do to make a success of it?Let’s pretend that somebody asked me to deliver a commencement speech in response to that question, preferably on a lush, ivy covered campus, near amiable watering holes.Thank you for inviting me to share this wonderful occasion with the workforce learning graduates of 2012....Let me begin by congratulating you on your career choice. I am sure you and your family are delighted—after all you could have chosen to go to law school. After years of clamoring for a seat at the table, C-levels are increasingly intrigued by what we can do for them. Pressure for growth, technology, and a competitive landscape create abundance and opportunity for workplace learning people. Every sector, from higher ed to pharma, is seeking candidates whose heads are screwed on right. What do I mean by right? I am talking about heads with an unrelenting focus on performance and results.Everything I say then is from the vantage point of celebration. I think this is a bountiful time to be in our field. I think you can get in the door. That's not the primary challenge. What's difficult is to make the most of it once you are in place.My advice to you as you commence this tasty career….·        It’s not about how. It’s about why. Several years ago, I served on a committee to review submissions for awards at an international conference. We considered a four-day course for engineers soon to be tasked with serving as instructors. The course devoted itself to teaching them Instructional Design 101, with half of the first day spent writing letter-perfect, four-part objectives. And so on and so forth. My eyes glazed over. The engineers’ eyes would close entirely. Wrong stuff.A more recent example came from online compliance training I was dragooned into taking. The topic was information security. Screen 3 listed the objectives. Only three of the eight had anything to do with my work and life. How would I endure the next 73 screens? Even animated pandas could not make this e-learning successful. Wrong stuff.In our business, we begin with the end in mind. Heaven help us when those ends are wrong-headed.·        It’s not about us. It’s about them. Sounds obvious, I know. But I can’t tell you how often I hear people say they want to put the program in the classroom because they themselves like to learn in the classroom. Or they are going to try out avatars because they are engaging. (Are they?)One twenty-something told me that she intended to do coaching for supervisors and managers. I asked why. She said she thought she would be good at it and that coaching was a good way to help people. While eloquent about her preferences and capabilities, she never mentioned evidence. Would coaching work in this case? Shouldn’t she review the literature on that matter? And what of her lack of experience as a supervisor and manager? The fact that she likes people is good but by no means sufficient.It isn’t what you want to do. It’s what the work, worker and workplace demand. There’s the challenge and the opportunity.·        It’s not any one thing. It’s many things, aligned, in systems. Forget shiny pennies. Mobile learning is an example of just such a penny. ASTD’s chief Tony Bingham loves it. I love it too. I’ve written about it. I see ample potential. But it is no slam dunk in and of itself. No single solution, not mobile or webinars or games or even gamification, is the answer. The value of each emerges within systems. Our goal is strategic benefit, such as making information available on demand, tracking performance, reminding of expectations, enabling tons of practice, or helping new customer service reps communicate with peers or coaches.Take the job of retirement specialist. Consider the stress the topic provokes in customers. Think about how much there is to know to do this job, and then extend your vision to the attention that regulators pay to it. If you are tasked with developing and supporting these professionals, best not throw a single solution at it, no matter how nifty that solution is. Your program must involve intense and graduated lessons, lots of practice with diverse cases, coaching and feedback, assessments and self-assessment—and that’s the development part of it. Surely you would want to provide human and automated resources available on demand to deal with infrequent questions, lengthy procedures and updates.Mobile? Games? Perhaps. Why not? What’s for sure is that there must be a concerted system. There’s the challenge and the opportunity.·        The soft stuff is the hard stuff. A few weeks ago I visited Deloitte University with 75 learning leaders. Our focus was leader development. Eric Paul from Dell said to nods all around, "The soft stuff is the hard stuff."And not just for leader development. The retirement specialist can’t just know about retirement, she must want to help. Same for the USPS. My postal deliverers know their job and then they do it with gusto. They stop back, wait a moment or two to get a signature, or brighten my day with a howdy. It’s knowing and doing and caring to exert effort. How do we influence that through training and development?How will you systematize the development of minds AND hearts and bellies? There’s the challenge and the opportunity.·         No matter how much you know today, success depends on your ability to learn continuously, forever . In the opening keynote at ASTD 2012, Jim Collins reminded us of the importance of humility.Now, as you launch your career, it’s time to weigh the value of humility. If you are humble, you know that you do not know it all. Your humility opens you up to lessons, messages, ideas and surprises. You seek them.Don’t just nod at me, graduates. What are you going to do to systematically assess and develop? How will you push yourself beyond your comfort zone? For starters, let me suggest that you join a local professional association, and an international too. ASTD is a great choice, but not the only one. Consider ISPI and eLearning Guild. Find one I don’t know about.Take advantage of the idea of a personal learning network. Tour regularly in domains with which you are not familiar, where you will encounter approaches that are not old hat to you. I did it yesterday. This morning I contemplated all that went into the development and mobile support that enabled a British tree surgeon to save a tiny finch.As you refresh your skills and perspectives, you will also inoculate yourself against burn out. There’s the challenge and the opportunity.I think commencement addresses are supposed to conclude with an inspirational quote from someone like John Kennedy or Martin Luther King.   Instead, I’ll turn to baseball. First, Pete Rose: “You owe it to yourself to be the best you can possible be—in baseball and in life.” Then there’s the speedy Lou Brock: “No one wants to hear about the labor pains, they just want to see the baby.” And finally, Yogi Berra, “I wish I had an answer to that because I'm tired of answering that question.”  Actually, I’m glad I got to answer a question about advice for new grads-- and I hope my thoughts will also be useful for the old grads who stumble upon these words. That’s what I hope you will be in your career—useful. Just a word, and within it is both the challenge and the opportunity.

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