November 2004 Archives

Today over the noon hour, Richard Chabrán spoke on the topic: Digital Dreams, Human Realities: The Strategic Role of a Keystone Species. Richard is chair of the California Community Technology Policy Group (CCTPG). CCTPG's goal is "to advocate for policies that assure underserved communities reap the economic, educational, health, and civic benefits offered by computers, the Internet, and new digital innovations. CCTPG was formed as the Computers In Our Future Policy Group in 1998 and expanded its steering committee in 2001."

Richard's touched on a number of the issues related to dealing the inequities in our society that lead to what he termed "Cyber Segmentation." These inequities primarily include material capacity, acquired skills, and differential use of digital technologies. He prefers to frame the discussion in terms of people rather than in terms of the "digital divide."

It was interesting to hear cyber segmentation framed by VoIP. Lower income families are limited due to infrastructure and the increased costs associated not just with cable TV but by the added digital cable costs. Cable service, he explained, is considered an "information service" and apparently not subject to universal access. This means less dollars to support universal access and reaching the people who need it. Richard concluded with a a couple examples of community-based projects: Southern California's Tribal Digital Village and Pluggedin.

Earlier today I went to an “audio conference” presented by GAZEL, Greater Arizona eLearning, an Arizona High Tech Industry Cluster group. Briefly, GAZEL’s mission is to “promote the growth of Arizona’s eLearning industry and theadoption of eLearning in business, education, government, and community development.” Visit GAZEL’s website for more information.

The program was hosted by the University of Phoenix at its site on Grant Road near Craycroft. Steve Peters who is on the GAZEL board and is the founder and driving force behind CITA was the Tucson moderator. About 16 people attended in Tucson at the U of Phoenix site and about 25 attended at the U of Phoenix’s site in Phoenix.

The program was entitled Selling eLearning To Management Colleagues and Customers. The theme interests me and was a topic discussed at the eLearning Guild Symposium that I attended in Scottsdale in February 2003. I found the most relevant points were made by panelist Frank Garcia who is President and CEO of Persistech. Garcia noted four hurdles in selling eLearning to management:

1. elearning often has an enterprise entry point via an LMS. This usually means that it needs a greater scope of people involved in its planning, managing, execution, and on-going support.
   
2. infrastructure: Garcia’s company has developed elearning for large companies and he used Shell Oil as an example to illustrate the hurdles encountered with Shell. Shell has people at sea on oil rigs that need to receive the elearning.
   
3. Change management: again, learners on an oil rig must accommodate significant changes in attitude and routine to properly experience elearning
   
4. feel good surveys: the surveys that assess elearning are often attitudinal and don’t measure learning in terms of needed skills acquisition
   

Garcia also spoke to assessing how the learning has had a positive or negative impact. In a university setting, we are “selling” instruction. But a corporation doesn’t sell it. The “gold standard” as he put it is still one-to-one and realizing this successfully in this environment is a challenge. He said another challenge is the use of language, especially in an international environment where English is not the lingua franca. From his experience of proposing his company’s services to corporations, he said that SCORM and ROI are big at the point of sale but not there on the operations side.

In addition to customer satisfaction look to assess if the training helped accomplish a programmatic goal of the company’s and assess if it changed behaviors and achieved results. Training specialists in the room with us who are with TEP spoke to the need to couple the training design with the organizations HR so that outcomes are matched to job needs. They recommend teaming a business analyst with instructional designers. Another trainer at our Tucson location noted that most learning takes place in a classroom because we can’t leave a classroom. The economics and ubiquity of elearning is what makes it successful and will drive its success in the future. This prompted a question of how to sell training to people who don’t have requirements. That is, they won’t realize a promotion with a particular certification. There was some sentiment that these are people, like entrepreneurs, who are driven to learn and look for any advantage that might be captured from an elearning course. However, it was stressed that the elearning experience must focus on what people need to assure success. As Garcia added, selling and finishing are two different things. People often pay for elearning and if it doesn’t meet a need early on, they are gone.

Eller is using the LTC's MovableType blogs for specific student projects that I find really showcase the application's value in promoting student experiences. These are in development at Eller and the release date is still a few weeks off.

The first is A Day In the Life... Undergraduate students on life in the UA's Eller College of Management. It will give interested students a forum to talk about their college experience and it has potential, it would seem, as a marketing tool as College recruiters meet with interested high school students. These high school students could see how current UA students describe their college experience. The second blog looks to a series of individual blogs called Student Insight: Student insights on life in the UA's Eller MBA Program. Since comments are being offered as a blog feature for these, we don't have to password protect them from those ubiquitous spammers who are deluging blogs offering comments with the usual trash.

Eller has also designed banner images for these blogs that capture the look and feel of the College's website. Here's a screenshot [35K] as an example.

This is a very good use of blogging and one that I want to share with other colleges on campus once the Eller blogs are up and populated.

As I wrote in a message last week, I'd add the URL once the website was up. It is found at http://parentseyes.arizona.edu/josiasjoesler. The introductory paragraph describes Brooks' theme.

When asked to name Tucson's most recognized architect, the first name that comes to most people's minds is Josias Joesler. This website presents Joesler within the context of Tucson’s architectural and community development, his prolific 30-year career with developer/builder John Murphey and his legacy providing lessons for appropriate architecture in Tucson.

Someone sent this out today. It's a worthy blog post.

"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt......If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake."

Thomas Jefferson, 1798, after passage of the Sedition Act

Looking back over the week, a lot of my thoughts have been around the election results. Few weeks have such major events and it had an impact on how we worked this week. But this blog is about work and professional thoughts, so ...

In terms of work, Andrew finished up the new interface for the etext version of Roy P. Drachman's Just Memories and I worked on the remaining aspects of revising code, changing some of the organization and moving the files into the main Through Our Parents' Eyes folder. I think the emphasis at this point is revising the interfaces for many of these old websites so the appearances aren't so embarrassingly "generation 2." The sites we are re-designing are coming out clean. looking. There aren't the bells and whistles we are used to seeing and these aren't anywhere as attractive as ones that Mike designs. However, they work and bring a more consistent feel to the site. I am hopeful we'll make more progress before fall semester is over. Andrew is working the Judge Huerta site now and next in line are Esteban, Promise and Tubac.

Casey did a great job on the new website Josias Joesler: An Architectural Eclectic. He has a change to the style sheet coming over this afternoon that will remove the righthand scroll bar and I'll move the files onto the Parents' Eyes site and update the links to it. It's going to be a valuable contribution, thanks to Brooks Jeffrey who provided the content, to the Architecture and Urbanism section of the project. I'll add the URL once it's up.