Comments on: Annoying Hype http://mfeldstein.com/annoying_hype/ What We Are Learning About Online Learning...Online Fri, 18 May 2012 06:39:00 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 By: Gary Dickelman http://mfeldstein.com/annoying_hype/#comment-2 Gary Dickelman Sun, 17 Oct 2004 20:49:19 +0000 http://2091536190#comment-2 I just returned from the Training/Online Learning conference in San Francisco, where Jay Cross et. al. introduced Workflow Learning (WL). I sat in on a number of the WL sessions and contributed to one as a presenter. Subsequently, I chatted with a number of conference participants for reactions, which were divided pretty evenly, as follows: > WL is noting new. Gloria Gery, the first "Workflow Learning Institute Fellow," had nothing new to say. WL=Performance Support. In her presentations on the subject, she used her standard fare. What's with all the hype? > It was refreshing to see learning placed in a workflow context at an e-learning conference. While the concepts are not new, the e-learning community needs to mature far beyond where it is today if it is to add real value to organizations with respect to competency and performance. The general consensus is that it was quite unnecessary to invent yet another term (WL) for what Gloria Gery articulated in 1989 (EPSS) and which has matured substantially to the present day. Jay Cross's statement that WL is "EPSS on steroids" underscores a superficial understanding of how EPSS, and more correctly "Performance-Centered Design" have evolved over the past 15 years. I take a dim view of building a straw man, then burning it down. If one is going to make a valid comparison, then one must rigorously and accurately document the comparative. The Workflow Institute simply failed to properly examine the extant literature on Performance Centered Design (PCD) before inventing the new WL paradigm. PCD focuses on business (organizational) performance through human performance by applying three fundamental perspectives and their rich disciplines: (1) Business / organizational process improvement (2) Human factors (usability, diversity engineering) (3) Information / knowledge architecture and management. The PCD lifecycle more than subsumes the fledgling principles of WL. Further, WL has little to do with workflow or learning. Business process, not workflow (in the strictest sense) forms the context; competency and performance, not learning, are the outcomes. Calling these ideas "Workflow Learning" only serves to confuse the issues and focus the discipline on the learning/training community, further exacerbating an aleady ineffective history around supporting performance. Learning technologists, while excellent in their craft, are provided little grounding in the engineering rigors of business process modeling, improvement, re-engineering and the like. Further, usability professionals, including human factors engineers, are much better equipped than instructional technologists to deal with issues of interactions and interface design. And the technology prerequisites for responsible PCD transcend the basic curricula and experiences of the learning technologies. Similar arguments can be made for information architecture and knowledge management. So why place the focus of WL on the learning community? Curious. I do not wish to undermine the honest contributions that Jay Cross and the WL Institute made to the Training conference this year. But I fear that the exercise has further confounded our attempts to codify and normalize the EPSS/PCD literature. Why do we need yet another term for these ideas? Regards, Gary I just returned from the Training/Online Learning conference in San Francisco, where Jay Cross et. al. introduced Workflow Learning (WL). I sat in on a number of the WL sessions and contributed to one as a presenter. Subsequently, I chatted with a number of conference participants for reactions, which were divided pretty evenly, as follows:

> WL is noting new. Gloria Gery, the first “Workflow Learning Institute Fellow,” had nothing new to say. WL=Performance Support. In her presentations on the subject, she used her standard fare. What’s with all the hype?

> It was refreshing to see learning placed in a workflow context at an e-learning conference. While the concepts are not new, the e-learning community needs to mature far beyond where it is today if it is to add real value to organizations with respect to competency and performance.

The general consensus is that it was quite unnecessary to invent yet another term (WL) for what Gloria Gery articulated in 1989 (EPSS) and which has matured substantially to the present day. Jay Cross’s statement that WL is “EPSS on steroids” underscores a superficial understanding of how EPSS, and more correctly “Performance-Centered Design” have evolved over the past 15 years.

I take a dim view of building a straw man, then burning it down. If one is going to make a valid comparison, then one must rigorously and accurately document the comparative. The Workflow Institute simply failed to properly examine the extant literature on Performance Centered Design (PCD) before inventing the new WL paradigm.

PCD focuses on business (organizational) performance through human performance by applying three fundamental perspectives and their rich disciplines:

(1) Business / organizational process improvement
(2) Human factors (usability, diversity engineering)
(3) Information / knowledge architecture and management.

The PCD lifecycle more than subsumes the fledgling principles of WL. Further, WL has little to do with workflow or learning. Business process, not workflow (in the strictest sense) forms the context; competency and performance, not learning, are the outcomes. Calling these ideas “Workflow Learning” only serves to confuse the issues and focus the discipline on the learning/training community, further exacerbating an aleady ineffective history around supporting performance.

Learning technologists, while excellent in their craft, are provided little grounding in the engineering rigors of business process modeling, improvement, re-engineering and the like. Further, usability professionals, including human factors engineers, are much better equipped than instructional technologists to deal with issues of interactions and interface design. And the technology prerequisites for responsible PCD transcend the basic curricula and experiences of the learning technologies. Similar arguments can be made for information architecture and knowledge management. So why place the focus of WL on the learning community? Curious.

I do not wish to undermine the honest contributions that Jay Cross and the WL Institute made to the Training conference this year. But I fear that the exercise has further confounded our attempts to codify and normalize the EPSS/PCD literature. Why do we need yet another term for these ideas?

Regards,
Gary

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