Speaking and Workshop Services

In Learning, Extended Brain and Topic Hubs, I talked about the story behind the launch of Speaking Pro Central.   While I've been speaking and conducting workshops for quite a while, I've never really treated this aspect of my professional life … well professionally.  So, this post (and since Blogger only allows posts) represents a first step.

For subscribers, I apologize – you only will see this once and then it becomes a fixture on the site that I can update.

Dr. Tony Karrer is an expert on innovative uses of technology that improves human performance and drive business results.  Tony educates individuals, businesses and organizations on social media, web 2.0 tools and the associated methods and skills.  Considering that he's a Ph.D. in Computer Science, Tony's speaking style is energetic, personal, and funny (sometimes intentionally).  Tony personalizes every presentation to make sure that it addresses the specific needs of the audience and is adept at adjusting during presentations to ensure that the audience is understanding and getting value.

He is author of the award-winning eLearning Technology blog, founder of Work Literacy, and creator of eLearning Learning. Dr. Karrer’s experience is diverse including founding CTO of eHarmony, associate professor of Computer Science, and consultant to Credit Suisse, Citibank, Lexus, Microsoft, Nissan, Universal, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun, Symbol Technologies and many others. He was valedictorian and attended USC as a Tau Beta Pi fellow, one of the top 30 engineers in the U.S. where he received a M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science.

Email Tony for his speaking fee information (akarrer@techempower.com).

Speaking and Workshop Topics

Tony can speak on a wide variety of topics, but here are a few recent topics that might spark ideas.

• eLearning 2.0 
• Work Literacy
• Learning 2.0 – Changes in Workplace Learning
• Learning 2.0 – Practical Applications for Organizations
• Social Media for Consultants
• Tapping the Social Grid
• Getting Traffic Through Social Media
• B2B Lead Generation Via Social Media
• Long Tail Search Engine Optimization
• Social Networks for Business Generation

Recent Presentations and Workshops

Tony presents, moderates and does workshops at a wide range of association, professional, corporate and organization events as well as online events.  Here are some examples of types of recent presentations and workshops.

• ASTD TechKnowledge Keynote
• Institute of Management Consultants
• ASTD Chapter Meetings
• ASTD Workshops
• ISPI Chapter Meetings
• Technology Council
• eLearning Guild
• Harvard Business School
• UCLA Entrepreneurs Conference
• Cal Tech Entrepreneurial Forum
• Keynotes and Workshops at Vendor Conferences
• Keynotes and Workshops at Corporate Conferences
• Vendor Webinars

Testimonials

“I have known and worked with Tony since the early 90's, and he has delivered a number of very popular presentations and wrap-up sessions at conferences my colleagues and I have produced.” William Brandon, eLearning Guild

"I wanted to thank you for the clear, fun and insightful information. Its good to hear of the solid business and learning applications for these technologies." Director of Learning, WellPoint

Tony gets great reviews from his presentations and workshops.  Here's a few of the evaluation comments from a recent one:

Awesome!!
Enjoyed being able to see live examples. Benefited from the barriers + work around discussion
Tony did a great job of providing an overview of various tools available. Nice job!
Excellent thorough, relevant & engaging!
Outstanding!!!
Tony is a great evangelist for web 2.0 – I’m pumped to use more
Excellent! Loved the way he started by gaining and understanding of current knowledge of audience
Great applicable knowledge to be applied
Tony is awesome…time well spent. Thank you!
Great case study application to process and think about application of ideas!
Now feel much better informed and confident to implement social tools in my organization, feel like the unknown has been “exposed” and best practices can be implemented
Outstanding!!
Wow!

Opportunities

Schedule Tony to speak at your event by emailing akarrer@techempower.com

Social Learning - Instructional Design - Free - eLearning Hot Topics

Weekly Hot eLearning Hot List 5/22/09 - 5/29/09

Top Posts

The following are the top posts from featured sources based on social signals.

1. Presentation: Blogs in Education- Don't Waste Your Time, May 22, 2009
2. Implementing New Learning Technology? Choose the Right Pilot Group- Kapp Notes, May 22, 2009
3. Capture Examples- eLearning Technology, May 29, 2009
4. Twitter: The #1 Tool for Learning- Upside Learning Blog, May 26, 2009
5. Adobe eLearning Suite: is it worth it?- Clive on Learning, May 29, 2009
6. Text to Speech- eLearning Technology, May 28, 2009
7. Poll:What is your favourite eLearning software?- Don't Waste Your Time, May 23, 2009
8. Discovering Instructional Design 6: Developing Objectives- The E-Learning Curve, May 28, 2009
9. Examples of Using Virtual 3D Spaces for Learning- Kapp Notes, May 26, 2009
10. Financial Investment- eLearning Technology, May 26, 2009
11. Discovering Instructional Design 4: The Affective Domain- The E-Learning Curve, May 25, 2009
12. Top 5 reasons for implementing LMS: LC Survey- Upside Learning Blog, May 24, 2009
13. Discovering Instructional Design 3: A Systems Approach- The E-Learning Curve, May 22, 2009
14. Favorite 10 Tools For Creating Learning- Business Casual, May 28, 2009
15. Skype screen-sharing collaboration & feedback- WISE Pedagogy, May 28, 2009
16. More Digital Natives- Upside Learning Blog, May 28, 2009
17. ASTD / ISPI Social Learning Workshop- Social Enterprise Blog, May 27, 2009
18. Gaining Audience Attention >- MinuteBio, May 27, 2009
19. Discovering Instructional Design 5: Stages in the Affective Taxonomy- The E-Learning Curve, May 27, 2009
20. Twitterfall - letting the web work for you- eLearning Acupuncture, May 26, 2009
21. Brain rule #9- Clive on Learning, May 26, 2009
22. How Do You Build A Team?- Blogger in Middle-earth, May 26, 2009

Top Other Items

The following are the top other items based on social signals.

1. 7 Tips for Better E-Learning Scenarios, May 26, 2009
2. Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009, May 24, 2009
3. Modern Corporate Training: The Enterprise Learning Framework, May 24, 2009
4. Poll Everywhere : Use Twitter in PowerPoint, May 27, 2009
5. Royalty-Free, Podsafe, and Stock Music, May 25, 2009
6. Googley design, May 26, 2009
7. Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech " How the book destroyed Community, May 23, 2009
8. WordWrap macro, May 29, 2009
9. 25 Tools: A Toolbox for Learning Professionals, May 22, 2009
10. Jay’s new book on learning metrics, May 25, 2009
11. The Power of Community | workforce.com, May 28, 2009
12. What would Andrew do?, May 26, 2009
13. The Excellent Inevitability of Online Courses - Chronicle.com, May 27, 2009
14. Creating scenarios for learning - a four-step guide, May 27, 2009
15. Learning and Working in Complexity Workshop, May 29, 2009
16. Will Higher Education Be the Next Bubble to Burst?, May 28, 2009
17. Integrating work support systems, May 27, 2009

Top Keywords

• Social Learning (18)
• Instructional Design (25)
• Free (36)
• Collaboration (17)
• Poll (4)
• Develop (15)

eLearning Script Tools

I received an inquiry from a reader who was trying to find tools that they should use for creating their eLearning Script.  They are in a Mac and PC environment and they have to pass scripts around fairly widely for review and input.  The scripts are for eLearning with media (voice-over and video).  They are considering a pretty wide range of solutions from eLearning specific, to media specific, to standard tools like Word and PowerPoint, to doing it as rapid prototypes using an authoring tool.

I was going to respond and then I realized that I hadn't looked at tools in this space in quite a while, so I'd like to hear from readers:

What do you use to create your eLearning Scripts?

What tools should this person consider?

 

Please add your comments.  I'll try to compile things in this post a bit like we do in the Big Question so that it becomes a pretty good resource based on responses.

Text to Speech

Update: there's a series on Text-to-Speech eLearning:

• Text-to-Speech Overview and NLP Quality,
• Digital Signal Processor and Text-to-Speech,
• Using Text-to-Speech in an eLearning Course,
  
• Text-to-Speech eLearning Tools - Integrated Products,
  
• Text-to-Speech vs Human Narration for eLearning, and
• Using Punctuation and Mark-Up Language to Increase Text-to-Speech Quality.
  

More coming on that.

As part of the eLearning Tour, Christopher von Koschembahr demonstrated a podcast where he conducted an interview. The interviewer was a female voice asking questions. She would ask a question and then he would respond. What was interesting is that the interviewer was produced using Text to Speech. You can listen to the result at the 12:23 mark of the first video on the eLearning Tour page.

The effect was interesting. For short bursts of text, the computer generated voice was okay. Thus, it works well with the interview structure. Of course, you quickly know that he's written the questions. Still it works for me. In general, I think the response during the session was positive.

Based on the comments during the session, a few questions came up:

• Does Text to Speech work for longer form content?
• Captivate 4 contains built in Text to Speech. Are people using that much? For what kinds of content?

I did a couple of tests with a few of the free Text to Speech services that I found to see what something that's a big longer would sound like. I tried YAKiToMe!, Feed2Podcast, SpokenText, and ReadTheWords. None of them produced something that I could listen to for any length of time. My conclusion -

Text to Speech works for short bursts, not for longer amounts of content.

I'd be curious what anyone is doing out there with Text to Speech beyond the example that Chris discussed.

Anyone using it in their Captivate courses? How? How much text do you use?

eLearning - Social Media - Mobile Learning

Here's what you might have missed last week...

eLearning Learning Hot List - May 15, 2009 to May 22, 2009

Top Posts

The following are the top posts from featured sources based on social signals.

1. The Challenge of Training the PlayStation Generation- The E-Learning Curve, May 15, 2009
2. Metalearning- eLearning Technology, May 20, 2009
3. Presentation: Blogs in Education- Don't Waste Your Time, May 22, 2009
4. Aligning Learning Theory with Instructional Design- The E-Learning Curve, May 21, 2009
5. List of System Variables in Cp4- Adobe Captivate Blog, May 15, 2009
6. Presentation: Wikis in Education- Don't Waste Your Time, May 19, 2009
7. How I use social media to learn- Adventures in Corporate Education, May 17, 2009
8. Implementing New Learning Technology? Choose the Right Pilot Group- Kapp Notes, May 22, 2009
9. Presentation: Social Bookmarking with Delicious- Don't Waste Your Time, May 15, 2009
10. Discovering Instructional Design, Part 1- The E-Learning Curve, May 19, 2009
11. Meeting icebreaker-How to get a group to acknowledge differences in perceptions.- Business Casual, May 16, 2009
12. Discovering Instructional Design 3: A Systems Approach- The E-Learning Curve, May 22, 2009
13. Shifting to Adobe eLearning suite – reuse existing Articulate Engage and Quizmaker content- Adobe Captivate Blog, May 19, 2009
14. Social Learning Podcast Transcripts - Top Objections Webinar & Twitter Troubles- Engaged Learning, May 21, 2009
15. MOBILE LEARNING - eLearning Tour Part 1 - Hosted by Corporate Learning Trends and Innovation- Discovery Through eLearning, May 21, 2009
16. Learning, Extended Brain and Topic Hubs- eLearning Technology, May 18, 2009
17. Road to Learning now featured on elearninglearning- Road to Learning, May 17, 2009
18. Do not go quietly into the classroom- Don't Waste Your Time, May 17, 2009
19. Should students be allowed Internet access in exams?- ThirdForce Blog, May 15, 2009
20. US Army Using Interactive Videos- MinuteBio, May 15, 2009

Top Other Items

The following are the top other items based on social signals.

1. A List Apart: Articles: In Defense of Eye Candy, May 16, 2009
2. Facilitating Online | Centre for Educational Technology, May 19, 2009
3. Are Your E-Learning Courses Pushed or Pulled?, May 19, 2009
4. 25 Tools: A Toolbox for Learning Professionals 2009, May 19, 2009
5. Learning 2.0 and Workplace Communities - 2009 - ASTD, May 18, 2009
6. Sensemaking, PKM and networks, May 17, 2009
7. The Mobile Learning Engine (MLE) for Moodle, May 18, 2009
8. Learning Management Systems 2009 - 2009 - ASTD, May 21, 2009
9. The Twitter Book, May 15, 2009
10. Mashups for Learning - 2009 - ASTD, May 21, 2009
11. Wolfram Alpha, May 21, 2009
12. A landscape of influences, May 18, 2009
13. E-learning: How to Perform Mime | Personal Cyber Botanica, May 21, 2009
14. Educate - iPhone ipod Touch App for teachers, May 20, 2009
15. 1,000+ Learning Professionals to follow on Twitter, May 16, 2009

Top Keywords

• Learning Management System (8)
• Knowledge Worker (4)
• Social Media (17)
• Social (45)
• Social Networks (29)
• Industry (19)
• Pattern (6)
• Mobile Learning (9)
• Forum (11)
• Management (28)
• eLearning (41)
• Learning (85)
• Knowledge (35)

Financial Investment

Should learning organizations make a financial investment in new forms of learning?

A fantastic comment by Bill Brantley on my post Metalearning:

Before you start defining metalearning, you need definitions for:

1. formal learning
2. informal learning
3. social learning
4. collaborative learning
5. personal learning

that are more than just marketing buzzwords.

What is the difference between these five concepts? What are the strengths and weaknesses with each? How does one know when they are practicing one form or another?

Before you start shutting down training departments, hiring Chief Learning Officers, and coining an umbrella term for different learning methods, you need to establish what you are actually talking about and why it is preferred over other methods. And you need to back this up with some empirical data.

I would love to have a discussion with him because I think he's missing the point about the importance of metalearning and metacognition and their implications on learning organizations. 

Important Challenge

That said, he's expressing a really important challenge.  Before a learning organization recommends to make a financial investment in any of these methods, they really want to know:

• What is it?
• What will it cost and what's the expected return?

When you look at various training methods such as classroom instruction, virtual classroom, courseware, online reference, performance support tools, they all have fairly well understood size, shape, characteristics.  There's enough body of knowledge, history and expectation that you can safely propose financial investment by a learning organization in these methods.  Yes, your budget is being cut, but it's way safer to propose on-going financial investment in a tried and true method than it is to propose shifting budget to new methods. 

In Corporate Training, I suggested what might happen if you shifted budget right now without having a solid backup as wonderfully explained by Dilbert:

 

If we want to really change where learning organizations spend time and dollars, the key ingredient is to help get more concrete about these terms and to be concrete about financial investment proposals.

Not a Short Answer

I wish there were a set of business cases that we could point to that would exemplify what a VP Learning/CLO should be presenting to their executive team.  Why not?

It's partly that these kinds of solutions are highly fragmented.  Look at the breadth of Examples of eLearning 2.0.  Add to it all the investment that could go along with Tool Set and Work Literacy. 

What should a VP Learning / CLO present to the executive team?

 

Related:

• The Paradox of Informal Learning (Form of Informal?)
• Informal Learning is Too Important to Leave to Chance
• More on the Form of Informal
• Formalizing and Investing in Informal Learning
• Numbers Behind Informal and Formal Learning
• Internet Time Blog: ROI is toast. Use EVA instead.
• ROI and Metrics in eLearning

Metalearning

I just got through reading Jay's post and article (with Clark Quinn) around Become a chief meta-learning officer – one of the hot list items from two weeks ago.  It's a great article, definitely worth a read.  It discusses the needed transition in focus of a CLO

The scope of the job of the CLO is mushrooming. CLOs will neither prosper nor even survive if they fail to take responsibility for the overall learning process within their organizations.

…

Your charter as Chief Meta-Learning Officer is to optimize learning throughout the organization, not just in the pockets that once belonged to HR. This takes a broader perspective than what you deal with day-to-day. You’ve got to rise above the noise to see the underlying patterns, and then optimize them.

The reality is that this equally applies to Learning Organizations and Learning Professionals.  The broader perspective he is talking about is to look beyond formal learning to informal learning, social learning, collaborative learning, and personal learning. 

What was particularly interesting about his article was the use of the term meta-learning.

Wikipedia defines meta-learning (in education) as:

The idea of metalearning was originally used by John Biggs (1985) to describe the state of ‘being aware of and taking control of one’s own learning’. you can define metalearning as an awareness and understanding of the phenomenon of learning itself as opposed to subject knowledge. Implicit in this definition is the learner’s perception of the learning context, which includes knowing what the expectations of the discipline are and, more narrowly, the demands of a given learning task. Within this context, metalearning depends on the learner’s conceptions of learning, epistemological beliefs, learning processes and academic skills, summarized here as a learning approach. A student who has a high level of metalearning awareness is able to assess the effectiveness of her/his learning approach and regulate it according to the demands of the learning task.

Jay's article is really using metalearning in a different way – take responsibility for learning across the organization.  Look at all the different ways learning can occur.  Close the training department.  Etc.

Still, when I read the title, I couldn't help but think that Chief MetaLearning Officer was particularly apt, especially when you take "metalearning" according to its definition above.  Metalearning is really about:

being aware and taking control of one's own learning

It is a critical element to success moving forward.  And it's exactly what I've been talking about over the past few years.  The only way to handle long tail learning is to focus on providing the tool set and personal learning and working skills (work literacy) that are central to concept work.  Where work and learning are not separate, metalearning is really the focus of performance improvement. 

In Learning, Extended Brain and Topic Hubs, the focus is really on a new process for learning.  Being aware and in control of the process is metalearning.  Nancy Devine in a comment suggested "schema building" which is similar to pattern identification.  But all of this is really about metalearning.

Way back in 2006, I wrote Improving Personal Learning - A Continuing Challenge for Learning Professionals, that also cited a CLO article on Implementing Learning How-to-Learn Strategies (which doesn't seem to exist anymore).  Three years later, we recognize the increasing importance, and the need for greater metalearning development opportunities and the role of learning professionals and learning organizations in this.

Is metalearning a good term to encapsulate what we are talking about?