The eLATED Blog

(Gary Woodill) Inter-Twingled Technologies: The Keys to the Emerging Enterprise Learning Landscape

When:                Tuesday November 29^th, 2016

Where:          Ryerson University – specific location to be confirmed

Times:            Welcome & Register:      5:15 pm – 5:30 pm

Presentation:                     5:30 pm to 6:30 pm

Networking Elixir:           6:30 pm to 7:30 pm

How do we describe the emerging multi-channel and multi-modal learning ecosystem? It’s not just mobile (which it might be), it’s not necessarily screen-based (although it can be), and it is not necessarily divorced from physical reality (but it certainly can be).

The new enterprise learning landscape as made up of a complex mix of many streams of learning content and experiences, a myriad of digital devices for interacting with learning materials, layers of infrastructure, platforms, and operating systems, and a variety of new tools to help make it all work together. To use information pioneer Ted Nelson’s delightful word, our learning technologies are "intertwingled," and rarely can they be separated out into single technology solutions.

In this talk, Dr. Gary Woodill unravels some of the complexities around the use of new digital technologies to understand what we need to know in order to effectively plan and deliver enterprise learning and development services over the next few years.

Gary identifies nine different clusters of strategies that can be used in learning and development that were simply not available in the days of learning in classrooms, and shows how instructional designers can combine these strategies for unique and personalized approaches to training.

 

About the presenter:

Gary Woodill is a senior analyst with Float, as well as CEO of i5 Research. Gary conducts research and market analyses, as well as assessments and forecasting for emerging technologies. Gary is the co-editor of "Mastering Mobile Learning," author of “The Mobile Learning Edge,” and the co-author of “Training and Collaboration with Virtual Worlds.” He also presents at conferences and is the author of numerous articles and research reports on emerging learning technologies. Gary holds a doctor of education degree from the University of Toronto.

The McDonaldization of eLearning?

I'm far from the first to raise a warning flag about the possibility of e-learning becoming McDonaldized.  Building on Ritzer’s classic work The McDonaldization of Society, there have been scholarly articles on related topics in the European Journal of Higher Education, The American Journal of Teacher Education , and a collection of writings on The McDonaldization of Higher Education published in 2002.

Given that this conversation has been going on since the turn of the century, it’s surprising how many e-learning professionals have not yet been exposed to it.  I suspect the reason is that many of us working within corporate settings don’t see our work as a part of the larger body of pedagogy running throughout all of our lives….  but we should!  If workers in the 21^st century are truly to become “lifelong learners”, then the work of e-learning professionals MUST be considered within this broader context.

At last Thursday’s meeting of eLated, we had a lively discussion of the ways in which e-learning may suffer from the excesses of efficiency, predictability, calculability and control*.  The discussion ranged back and forth between our experiences as designers AND as consumers of e-learning.

We also uncovered a number of examples of what Ritzer called the “irrationality” of a McDonaldized system.  One of the most familiar of these occurs when we force a learner to watch a video in its entirety before moving to the next s
egment.  The learner soon discovers that what is actually required is that the video is PLAYED, not that it is WATCHED, and certainly not that it is UNDERSTOOD. 

We then end up in a sort of arms race with the learner.  To ensure they don’t skip through the content, we add a quiz.  Then the learners quickly guess their way through the quiz, only caring that they achieve the required score.  Then we make the quiz harder, and drawn from a randomized bank of questions.  And so on. 

The main point of our evening was an agreement that, unfortunately, there are elements of e-learning that sometimes reflect the negative aspects of McDonaldization.  As e-learning professionals, we need to educate ourselves about the danger signs and pitfalls, and ensure that we design training that is original, engaging and evaluated to ward against “irrational” outcomes.

Please connect with David Langlotz at https://ca.linkedin.com/in/davidlanglotz.

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*For a basic introduction to McDonaldization, there many easy to understand summaries on the web, including those by Ahmed Tharwat  and Ashely Crossman .