Heads-up.
Heads-up. This post is gonna be most relevant to ASTD folks. And probably especially for folks in, or considering joining, the ASTD Orange County chapter.
(Update: Since the meeting/presentation that occurred on the evening of Wednesday, November 19, 2008, I've had an opportunity to clean the notes up a bit.)
For Instructional Design professionals in the local area (Orange County, CA) who haven't attended one of our monthly learning/networking events, these usually start off with some unstructured / informal mingling and professional networking. (Business cards are usually pretty good to have on hand.)
Then, the dinner buffet line opens up and we all continue networking and discussions in the meeting room around table rounds of 6 to 8. The board president usually kicks-off with about 15 minutes of administrative announcements, job announcements, and formal connections of those looking for job opportunities with others who have connections for job opportunities.
In addition to the intros above, the section below lists other events coming up for the coming year that you might want to keep in mind for planning purposes.
Administrivia
The Chapter's President Elect shared some initiatives I'm personally looking forward to for next year.
- Here's a great opportunity for local ASTD Chapter members (and/or others thinking about joining): The chapter will be looking to conduct many affordable workshops in the new year. To pull this off, the chapter will naturally be looking for membership support to host meeting venues and speakers to host workshops. The upside: these represent great opportunities to gain visibility by hosting a workshop or conducting a presentation on topics or subject areas that you have expertise in.
- A special interest group for authors and writers will be kicking off. The focus will cater to getting published.
- There will be a strong focus throughout the year next year on networking. The board will be open to your ideas.
- In January, expect a learning/networking event devoted to structured networking. This is a direct outcome of a focus group that was conducted this past summer.
The Snowflake Effect: Readiness for the Age of Uniqueness.
7:00 PM.
At this point we conferenced in Wayne Hodgins.
Mr. Hodgins conducted his presentation from Orlando, Florida.
Hodgins is an Autodesk Fellow and a Strategic Futurist. His presentation slides will be made available later for download. (Update: See presentation slides below.)
slideshare: www.slideshare.net/wayneh
blog: www.longslowchat.wordpress.com
bio: www.learnativity.com/waynehodgins.html
website: www.autodesk.com/waynehodgins
"A new perspective is worth 80 IQ points"
~Alan Kay
"The Snowflake Effect", what's that about?
Snowflake Effect: Readiness for the Age of Uniqueness
We're all snowflakes in the sense that no two of us are alike. Yet, if that's true, why then do we design things for sameness? Our development and production models are base on the principle of mass production vs. mass customization.
Moving forward, mass customization is the direction we need to take our development efforts.
One example Wayne uses for mass customization: the music web site born from the music genome project: www.Pandora.com. (Note: I use this service. It rawks! And you have to try it.)
Pandora.com is a free service that dynamically serves music preferences based on user input. It matches user preferences by matching user-identified music songs or artists. Then, based on matching 400+ attributes of the preferred song(s) and/or artist(s) with similar attributes of other songs and artists, Pandora plays mass songs delivered to be in sync with preferences of the user.
The challenge for instructional designers: How to emulate a similar granular customization for learners?
7:30 p.m.
Future Trend: We'll have the ability to granularly define characteristics of people in a similar fashion as, say, Pandora's 400+ musical attributes, such that will we may be able to match human characteristics for compatibility. E.g., Project team composition, more purposeful dating site algorithms, (matching learning modules with human performance needs?)
(Question: Doesn't this define a sort of Orwelian scenario?)
Two other major Trends:
Living in a World of Exponential Change.
Interesting: He shows a graph with a trend series for the exponential growth of computer (see slide #28)... in the next panel, he overlays a graph of exponential growth of human life expectancy. (Interpretation...?)
If you look at ANY change, it turns out that it plots out to be an exponential (not linear, but exponential) curve.
"All" change, as it turns out is exponential. I.e., it's growing at an accelerated rate. Yet, as society and/or professionals, we're prepared only for linear change and unprepared for exponential (accelerating) change.
The new-world workforce.
Change is accelerating... an aging workforce has many implications:
- What if they don't retire?
- Retirement redefined
- Recruitment & retention
- Experience capture, share & re-use.
Another big trend: Shifting From Left-brain to Right-brain.
BooK: Dan Pink, "A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future
Tasks traditionally performed using logical left side of our brain will "dramatically" shift to tasks that are characteristically attributed to the right side of the brain.
Left-brained tasks will increasingly become automated, freeing up opportunity to focus on creative activities, design, creative development.
Questions:
Denise: When you talked about the personalizatio of "everything" how do you envision this affecting "community"?
Answer: We're not only unique as individuals, but when we come together as a group, we're unique as well. Communities will become ever more important moving forward. But we may have to rethink our idea of communities... today they seem very "noun" oriented. However, in fact, communities are very much "verb" oriented... more dynamic, action oriented. We'll have to rethink our view of communities to be more action-oriented.
Janet: How do you overlay the recent presidential election in context of your comments this evening?
Answer: (He's Canadian, so he's an outsider.) Wayne is optimistic that the future is brighter for the U.S. than before... not a political statement, rather he sees the possibility of U.S. getting past the tendency to categorize people (race, age, etc.)... there seems more opportunity for change moving forward.
Denise: With looking at traditional T&D model of most companies and then looking at technologies available today, how do you see companies being able to take advantage of the newer technologies especially with limitations of firewalls, IT, etc.?
Answer: I think we're still waiting for the revolution to happen... we went toward a trend for a while to create smaller and smaller chunks of training modules, but thinks we're missing the boat... it's not about creating smaller time-chunks of training modules, rather we need to focus on granular EXPERIENCES that are meaningful to people...to focus on technologies that allow us to focus on delivering those experiences.
The Metaphor of Flapping vs. Flying.
Early designs of flight mimicked birds flapping. These designs prevailed for a long time. An outcome of people building upon designs that were a result of prevailing conventional wisdom. It wasn't until started to break away from conventional wisdom that the solution to flying was solved. As it turns out, designers realized it wasn't about flapping, it was about lift and wing shape.
The point being, we gotta exercise our ability to think differently from conventional wisdom in order to create new solutions that innovate.
eLearning challenges are similar... we're mimicking models of conventional wisdom about how learning happens in a classroom. So, eLearning has become about technology and how well we can mimick the classroom in an electronic medium. E.g., creating electronic functionality and features that show "classroom type attendance," features that allow participants to "raising hands," etc.
However, what is really needed is to break away from traditional models. Similar to the metaphor of "flapping vs. flying," the industry needs to break out and focus on "lift".
Rather than focusing on technology and how it can mimick the physical classroom, we should focus on identifying and facilitating granular modules of deeply personalized learning experiences... experiences that reproduce, in a learning context, the "aha" moments people have when having ephiphanies of new knowledge.
We're not there yet, but that's the direction in which we have to move...
[Speaker Concluded]
After the speaker's portion of the meeting, there was some more great informal netowrking and discussions. Some of the folks who were looking for job opportunities had an opportunity to meet with those who had opportunities in their company.
During one of the breakouts I had an opportunity to speak in some detail with colleagues who had questions abou social media and Twitter and LinkedIn and... stuff that would make good exploration for another blog post.
Final point: If you're an instructional designer or a trainer, you should really consider joining a local chapter of ASTD.
