 Y cwlaif hefyd yn y sefydliad Clyf Shepard. Clyf Shepard yw'r cwlaif hefyd yn y cwlaif hefyd yn y cwlaif hefyd. Rydych chi'n cymryd 25 ymlaen i'r gwleidio cyfnodau ymlaen. Dwi'n gwybeth o'r cyfnod trwy'r ac yn ystodol pennaf yn y blog. Yn y sefydliad Clyf hefyd yn ysgrifennu cyhoedd yng Nghymru'i newid yng Nghymru E-content. Hy, arwad judgedd John. I feel a little bit in a minority for one of the first times in years for making presentations. That that I don't normally speak to an audience that is primarily educationally based. Can I ask is there any body here that doesn't work in the educational sector? Okay, so I am right, I really am in a minority here today. Okay, I obviously can only speak from my experience. yn y cyfrifio'r rygwun yw'r cyfnod, mae'n fawr i'w ddweud o'r llunio'n technologi a'r ffordd o'r ymdweud yn ei ddwyllfa'r ddechrau yma yn ei ddechrau. Yn gweithio'n gwneud, mae'n gweithio'n gweithio. Fe oeddwn i'n hoffi i fynd i'n rhoi'r cyfrifio'r cyfrifio'r ddim yn y dyfodol ar y ddweud, ond rwy'n yn du i bwysig, rydyn ni'n gofio'r cyfrifio'r cyfrifio'r ddim yn ein bwysig dwi'n ddweud o'r ddiwedd ychydig o'r wych, oherwydd ymddylch ar y gyfyrdd ymdyn nhw dda'r prydau. Mae'r ddweud o'r parolel o'r ddylch yn ei dweud o'r ddeud o'r ddweud o'r ddeud, dyfoddi'r ddweud o'r parolel o'r ddweud yma o'u ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud. byddwn ni i wneud o'r yrhynwys gennych argyfwiel, ac rwy'n beth sy'n rwy'n beth sy'n gwybod y fforddigol o'r yrhynwys. Rwy'n gwaith o'r cystafl o'r fforddigol. Mae'r reilio ni'n gweithio éw'r gyffredinol o fforddigol yn y llyfr yn oedach hyffredinol, y fforddigol sy'n bydd ni i gyrddio'r fforddigol o'r fforddigol o'r fforddigol ac yn y rheswedd cymaint a'r blaenauion gwneud ar unbelievableol, ac ydych chi'n dweud o'r cyffredinol yng Nghymru, oherwydd mae'n ddweud o'r byw. Mae'n mynd i'n gweithio, ond oherwydd, mae'n ddiogelio'r ddaeth ymlaen yn ymlaen i'r llanwgau ac i'r ddweud i'r cyfnod o'r ffordd ond mae Julie yn dweud o'r ddweud, ac yn ymlaen i'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud. Felly, mae'n dweud o'r ddweud yn ymddangos un form o'r e-content yn y ffugir, But many forms and some exciting developments which do threaten in some ways very hierarchical top-down structures of the way most organisations run. Let's face it, most of us don't work in organisations like Google. We work in insurance companies and banks and in the civil service or in universities. We don't necessarily have the luxuries of having an enormous amount of bottom-up influence in organisations. Rydyn ni'n ddau bod rhaid o'ch ddaf yn gweithio arall, rydyn ni'n gweithio arall? Rydyn ni, how could it possibly be? Felly dyna rhaid oherwydd yw'r rhaid i'w cyflwnt 100,000 oed argymell. Rydyn ni'n ddau i'n gweithio arall ymlaen i gyd ac rwy'n ddau'n ddau? Rydyn ni'n ddweud i chi yw'r prif ar y ddweud nad yw'r diolch. Rydyn ni'n gweithio arall a yna. 100,000 ysgol. Yn ymweld yw 100,000 ysgol, mae'n cael ei chlyw. Fy fyrddwch amser y tywl yn cyllid i'r ddech. Mae'r TV yn gyllid yn cyllid yn cyllid i'r cyllid i'r ddech fel y dyfodol. Fy fyddai'r ddech chi'n gweithio'r ddau, mae'r ddau'r ddau'r ddau'r ddau'r ddau. Mae'n mynd i chi'n cyllid iaith, mae'n gyllid i gweithio'r gwasanaeth. Mae'n gyllid i'r ddau'r ddau. Fy fyddai'r ddau'r ddau'r ddau'r ddau'r ddau. Mae'n ymnydd i'r tiynau i gofnodi, fewn i'r rhaid yw aillaw, awr mae'r ddau'r ddau'r oed wedi hyn yn ddadlol sydd yn oed. Mae'r ddau'r ddau'r ddau yn gweithio'r ddau. Well, in those it was about 100,000 years ago that I joined the world of learning development. It was a few years after that that I would say I was a learning technologist. But nevertheless it's been, I've had a fair stint at this particular job. And in learning and development generally, I always like to think that nowhere near as much has changed as has in the rest of the world. But I'm going to concentrate on learning technology and what's changed there. Now why I'd like to do that, is to give you a little bit of a sort of history lesson The TARDIS is both for the Doctor Who fans. We going to take a timingTim machine back over those decades that I think learning technology has changed on the world of the corporate world. I think there'll be some parallels for you, but this is very much how I see it. This is a UK history of corpus learning. Another way of phrasing that is every dog has its day, which I didn't know that was a rude thing to say. Fyd y wneud i wneud o sicr o'r llyfr yn y rhaid yn ddweud yn y cwyllgor. Ond yn y cwm, yw'n gwybod yn 70 oes yng nghymru ag ein ffwrdd i ffwrdd a'u gweithio'r gwyllgor. Mae'r gwybod i'r ffwrdd a'u trwy'r ddweud. Ac mae'r American's wedi arwad yn ddylai ddwylo'r ddweud, I don't never have liked that term, but that is still the term we primarily use in this country for describing someone who designs an e-learning experience. But this really was their era, and unfortunately, and it may not apply as much in education in the corporate world, the heritage of that instructional design era was very much from, I would say, not a behaviourist perspective, but certainly cognitivist and certainly not a very liberal educational philosophy. Much of it was driven by the US, the military and the work that they did on instructional design in the Second World War. And in many respects, we've had a lot of trouble shaking that off. And I think there's still, if you were to do a course on instructional design today, you'd still be trotted out very much the same old material that people were taught back in the 1970s. But this was the era when the designer was king. In that respect, we have to say that, that was a very fortunate period. Because along came, does anybody remember laser vision? This is very embarrassing if you have to put your hand up to these things, because it shows that you are very much in the baby boomer generation and therefore can't be too long before you retire, which is supposed to be a catastrophe for the world, as we know. And in my case it will be. But I remember the era of video very fondly, because I came into learning technology through video and through training. And we had some fantastic projects done in the early 80s with using video just hooked up to BBC microcomputers, Apple IIs and IBM PCs. Does anybody remember the Doomsday project? Yeah, what a fantastic project. Apparently somebody has managed to get it working again on a modern computer, which really was a wonderful piece of work. I always look back fondly on these periods, because it always seemed to me that the very best work I've ever encountered was done in those days, in content development, I'm talking about, not in the use of technology for learning in a broader context. But some of the very best work was done there. And if we go on into more into the later 80s, the era of the programmer, this is when people used to do artificial intelligence degrees. Is anybody unfortunate enough to do that? It's a profession which is very much subsided, along with all sorts of dreams that never quite came to reality. But one of the interesting side effects of the era of the programmer in the design of content was that we really did attempt some very ambitious things, particularly in areas like the concept of intelligent tutoring, software that was genuinely personalised, that genuinely responded to you as an individual, that built up a profile of you as an individual, and was able to come back to you with intelligent responses. Whether that's a worthwhile thing or not, it was a great thing to try. Unfortunately, I don't think there are anywhere near as many attempts being done at doing that now. But in the era of the programmer, before everything done was done with rapid tools, those sort of things were quite common. And in fact, I remember having an AI programmer working for me in languages like Lisp and things that I had known. I actually managed to find a bit of Lisp there on Google Images to show you out there. But languages which have been long forgotten. But we really did attempt some interesting things. But the era of programmer faded as with the era of video because CD-ROMs dominated the world of e-learning content come about 1990. And this is when the term multimedia was coined. And multimedia became the name for the profession, just as e-learning or learning technology is now. And CD-ROM had one very big disadvantage in that when it was first introduced it didn't have enough bandwidth to support video. So we were brought back to graphics, still graphics and animation being the primary media driver, if you like, visual driver. And the graphic designer became king. In fact, graphic designer took over, dominated the experience from that point on and interfaces and everything else became much more important than learning design. Programmers, you tried to avoid using them because that slowed down the whole process and made it very expensive. And so we developed a model which is not that dissimilar from what we see now, graphics and text orientated content. Some good things came out of that, some lovely graphic design. But unfortunately the instructional designer was way down the pecking list at this point in time and so learning became much less ambitious. Anyway, I sort of left the area of content development as a profession probably about 10 years ago which I'd been involved in running a very large, in terms of these can be very large production studio where all of these things happened. But the phenomenon that made me get out of this was the fact that I particularly hated was the fact that everything was late and everything was over budget and therefore customers were always screaming at you. Everybody was always incredibly unhappy and I didn't want to spend my days managing those projects. Now, the era of the project manager has solved that because when I talk to people now who do content development they hardly ever talk about the fact that a project being over budget or late we've become extremely efficient at producing content. I don't know whether your experience is like this. It seems like an impossible dream but apparently this is true. Anyway, we're very good at it now, it's a very efficient business but on the other hand in a way the e-learning community, if you can call it that, can be accused of being rather blinkered and they're being rather blinkered because as we've heard from Gillian he'd probably heard from every presentation this year and for the last five so much is changing that we need to be rethinking what that content is. We've gone through all these stages of development but is that what we're producing actually any use? Do we want to carry on doing that? Some of the things that have changed in that period obviously connectivity, the very biggest difference that I've experienced in learning technologies when the internet and particularly the worldwide web came in in the mid-90s because now what we were looking at as a medium was not just the content delivery medium but a communication and collaboration medium and in many respects that should be the dominant use of the internet in learning sense, communication and collaboration however in the world of corporate e-learning content is still absolutely king but that connectivity has been rather ignored so all we have now is the same old content that would have been on CD-ROM or on interactive video disc presented online. We've got obviously much greater IT literacy so the people that we are working in learning development are not all completely naive now in terms of technology we can equate that to teachers perhaps and certainly the people that we're training are not illiterate anymore there's a much wider IT literacy we have much more easy to use tools and we have very different expectations as we're talking about in terms of people wanting to feel that content is something that they can be involved in and this is going to be something I'm exploring in a minute so as far as I'm concerned the blinkers are on very much and that's the best I could get on blinkers by the way on but apparently that's what blinkers are and what we're really entering I think in terms of content development is the era of the user and that means that essentially content development is a user-generated phenomenon as well as a specialist top-down phenomenon and that's what I'd like to explain to you how that might happen and just I don't normally like these sort of big corporate executive quotes but this one is so scary and this chap I actually think if I was to meet him I wouldn't like him at all and he would be very scary but I think he ran General Electric in the US well Jack Welch actually hit the nail on the head with this particular quote that when the rate of change exceeds the rate of change inside then essentially the end is in sight and so many of us are probably experiencing that phenomenon at the moment where we feel that somehow or other we're just not keeping up with what's the change that's occurring in society and we might be if we're not careful we become marginalised on the periphery of the world of learning in many respects in the corporate setting that point's been hammered home anyway over the last few years that at least 80% of everything that anyone learns at work is learnt informally it's never learnt not learnt through any formal intervention I would say it's much higher than 80% it could be 95% so that's already making us feel peripheral and if we're not careful we become even more peripheral so this is a model which in the true tradition of training I'm sure it applies in education has been stolen lock, stock and barrel this isn't mine from a good friend of mine called Nick Shackerton-Joneson who works at the BBC who actually has a great job title of a head of informal learning I think it must be unique in corporate setting and he presented this pyramid idea and I'd like to pass this on to you and what he was saying that the top end of this pyramid is the sort of content that I've been describing over the last few decades is what I call high end content often I call Hollywood content in other words it's designed for big audiences and it's designed with big budgets and lots of specialists working on it and there's a very good argument for having high end content if you have large audiences or you have critical skills and knowledge in part but it's not flexible enough to cover the whole need so we're now hearing very much in the corporate sector about the concept of rapid e-learning is essentially much more quick and dirty content still produced from the top down primarily but it's coming from subject experts and generalist teachers and trainers if you like rather than from specialist designers of content and of course at the same time we're seeing the phenomenon not so much I think in the world of work yet but certainly outside the world of work where content is not just something that is done to you but it's something you participate in the creation of whether that's in a formal learning context where content is seen as the output of the learning experience rather than the input to the learning experience or whether it's part of your informal learning that you do at work where you contribute to the if you like the reservoir of information and knowledge which is open to people in your organisation and with all the changes that we're seeing the higher IT literacy, the better connectivity, easier tools that's becoming a very realistic process so we've got some content which is cut is centralised, it's top down it's coming from some managerial decision it's given some formal budget which is probably to meet the using the sort of preter principle the 20% of needs which apply or 80% of occasions and all those needs which are highly critical so obviously if you work in a type of job where there are very dangerous aspects to what you do like flying a plane or whatever there may only be a few of you as pilots in that organisation but the skills that you have to learn are so critical that it still has to be approached on a top down basis and we're very glad when we fly to find out that our pilots have spent hours in a simulator that cost millions and millions of dollars even though we might say well that's a lot of money to spend on one person's training we're very glad that they do that on the other hand organisations changed so rapidly and what people need to know changes so rapidly that if we didn't have some bottom up mechanism and they always have existed after all we've always helped each other to learn at work we talk to each other we ask our friends we might write a little job age and create them for each other but we can formalise that process by more of the bottom up creation of content now you've probably heard of the context of the long tail and I think the long tail applies equally well in a corporate setting in content as it does in the broad sense now if you haven't heard of the context of the long tail it's really the idea that if you were to take the example of say an Amazon as a book shop that the or let's take the example of an ordinary book shop to take first of all like a Borders or a Waterstones or whatever that they they've got very limited book space they can only afford to keep the a certain number of books available there and then that you can take off the shelf so they have to look at the large audiences who are most likely to come in and need content whereas if you looked at something like Amazon's book sales the majority of the sales that they make are books of books that would never appear in Waterstones or in Borders because the minority as the long tail spreads out here over to the right where the quantity of people who have a particular requirement reduces and reduces till it's just a few people that are interested in the particular topic the long tail if you look at the area of the long tail it's greater than the number of people who are in the mass media majority and Amazon actually sells more books of that category than they would do of the former category so if we put this in the context of e-content then you could say that where we have a need we have a large number of people who need a particular piece of content then this is a job for specialists and I think that there's always been some resistance in training and that might be true in education as well some resistance to the idea of centralising anything in other words but you actually create some great pieces of content you do it once you don't keep reinventing it and then it's done forever after the greatest and best piece of maths teaching software or the greatest and best bit of teaching of how to do marketing or whatever it might be that sometimes it is actually a good idea to centralise effort and get the job done really well and that's the sort of Hollywood model if you like hopefully better more sophisticated content that Hollywood would produce then I think as you go down through the long tail you've got jobs that I would say are for the subject experts and the generalist teachers and trainers who can contribute content that's still on a top down basis because it's coming from purveyors or facilitators of learning rather than learners themselves but they can meet that middle sector whereas enthusiast users or ordinary employees in organisations can also make a big contribution it's not going to be everybody that does it is going to be the enthusiast let's just think about what we're talking about with content because content is a rather like many things it's a word which is hard to define let's just remember first of all we're talking about all sorts of media text and graphics, audio and video I think also content has different purposes it's not just learning it can also be essentially selling an idea it can also be providing information now in a pure educational context these distinctions are quite important but in an organisation of context they're much less important providing information that helps someone to do their job without them actually learning that information is still a very valuable thing to do providing information that at the same time selling an idea is also a very valuable thing to do if you don't combine and coordinate these things you have to treat them you have to often duplicate the content development activity but content can have multiple purposes and I think one of the most difficult things I find to get across to learning designers is the fact that the interactivity which if you like is necessary to turn content into learning can happen in different ways too and I think this is perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of this that you can make the content itself interactive as we all know and that if you like forces the pace it creates a form of structured instruction or some sort of guided discovery activity but essentially somebody has preordained what that interactivity should be but I think it's also perfectly okay to say that content can be linear or non interactive in other words it's a passive experience in terms of the medium itself but you the learner can create your own interactivity you can make it into a learning experience because you do things like write notes you reflect on things you discuss them with your colleagues you create the interactivity that makes reading a book or listening to a presentation or listening to a podcast or a radio program into a learning experience so that the independent learners are capable of doing that sometimes I'm one of the biggest criticisms there is of most e-learning content is that it's patronising and dull and often that's because the interactivity is being built in for people who don't actually need that all that prompting and saying now is the time to reflect now is the time to test what you know on this particular topic and in fact they're perfectly capable of doing that for that themselves present the content in a really engaging interesting way might be enough but the other thing and this is very dominant way of thinking now I think corporate e-learning is that the interactivity can be in another learning form formal learning form like it could be that you view a piece of content and then you discuss it in a classroom or you read a piece of content and you discuss it on a forum or in a virtual classroom or in some other place the content doesn't have to be a self-contained activity it can just be a trigger or a catalyst for some other formal learning activity so again you hear about the concept of this content is just a page-turner I don't think you heard that expression it's very common criticism of content just a page-turner because it's not interactive in any way and yet we never describe a level in a negative way by saying it's a page-turner we say this is a real page-turner it's a real compliment this is something that we can't wait to turn the next page it's not the fact that it's a page-turner it's the fact that what is on the pages isn't very interesting so interactivity for its own sake built into the content isn't always important and if you take the interactivity out of the content it actually becomes a lot easier for teachers and trainers and people who are not formally trained designers to create content which make a very big contribution because one of the most difficult things if they have to do it the old-fashioned way if you like with a lot of integrated interactivity they have to learn how to program that or create those interactivity using tools and so on so here's just some examples of the sorts of things that you might see as top-down content and some of the sorts of things you might see bottom up and I'm not saying then that we're just talking about the traditionally learning tutorials and games and simulations and things on the top-down side some of those are just fairly passive media like white papers and podcasts and interviews and so on and so content can take very many forms and on the bottom up we've got all of the new user-generated content forms that we've heard about and probably participate in ourselves and like Gillie I'm a big believer in blogging and I suppose I have to be as someone who spends far too much time doing it I'm a big believer in the power of blogging as a learning experience although I must admit that I'm also very skeptical about how many people would actually want to do it on a long-term basis but there certainly are enthusiasts and I used that term earlier enthusiasts in organisations where there are a lot of people who would like writing blog postings putting postings on to forums creating content in wikis and so on so let's just remind ourselves why do we need rapid content in organisations? I'm just going to do this really quickly this is how rapid e-learning is defined at the moment essentially it's done quickly and it's done by subject experts or you could call them teachers and trainers rather than by experts when we're talking about rapid e-learning why are we doing it? because apparently an awful lot of training challenges now are time critical and this is just a US figure but I think it's true over here as well a great majority of trainers are under pressure to produce their e-learning much more rapidly we need a way of producing content that isn't Hollywood we need a much cheaper model and those people that sell this is an argument I presented a few times to some of these tool manufacturers themselves some of the most popular tools makers in the world of rapid e-learning in other words these are people who produce tools that allow you to create interactivity learning very quickly are I think at the moment swimming in a very big fish in a very small pond this is how I describe them in other words they're selling to this same community of educational technologists and e-learning people whereas in fact the number of people who could be producing content really good content is actually all of those people who have access to technology anywhere in the world who are involved in the world of work so they could actually be a small fish in a very big pond selling hundreds of millions of copies of their tools and software because there are hundreds of millions of people who would like to be able to share their presentations and their thoughts and their their rules and guidelines and principles with other people I don't know why they don't find that a very exciting possibility but in fact the reality is that they're very much the big fish in the small pool so we're not just talking about rapid content from the top down we're also talking about bottom up content and I'm going to explain why I think bottom up educational content is the idea and I'm going to do this with a series of pictures which my wife took and didn't have any idea what I was going to do with them and she was extremely confused about this activity but let me take you through a number of different scenarios now I am not a professional photographer okay that's not in itself very interesting but even though I'm not a professional photographer I can produce really fairly decent quality photographs and I can edit them in very low cost, extremely high powered software and I can distribute my photographs on the World Wide Web 2 you know is it one and a half billion people now I'm not a professional movie director if I was I would I be here I'd be on the beach in in Cannes but even though I'm not I can edit and I can use low cost tools low cost software to produce really quite half decent movie material and it's worth remembering that when I first went into corporate video in 1983 and we used to charge £1,000 a minute then for video £1,000 a minute in 1983 we would probably be charging a small fraction of that 25 years on and I can distribute my videos and do on YouTube to one and a half billion people similarly I'm not a professional author but I can use really good software to lay out a book I can even make that book available to the whole world printed on demand so if you want my book you can say I want a copy they print it to demand and send it to you it doesn't matter if it's any good because there's no publisher that gets in the way to act as a mediator in that process and I'm not a professional graphic designer but you know I can put together a few graphics and even if I want to I can even share those graphics with a billion and a half people and I'm not unfortunately I did try I did try back in the late 60s but professional music I'm not a professional musician but I could do practically anything I wanted on the software in my in my own office and I could share that easily on my space and things like that now the upshot of all this is I am a professional content developer or at least I have been over the years but if I wasn't a professional content developer like these people I wouldn't have the faintest clue that there were fantastic tools around that enabled them to you know to create really good content even sometimes just based on PowerPoint presentations but with lots of extra things added in voiceovers and interactivity and so on that I could produce those with tools which are just as easy as the tools that I've just been talking about and I can you know it's even possible to buy enterprise-wide systems which allows every person in your organisation to have access to these tools but if I was one of those people who wasn't a professional e-learning developer I would be the last to know about it because somehow or other when people buy these enterprise-wide tools they forget to tell anybody other than the professional developers what is the reason for this so how many more times do we have to be told that things are changing that there's now a very blurred distinction between who's a teacher and who's a learner who's an author and who's a reader we're all participants in this it's a much more democratic process this is a really really hard concept to bring into a hierarchical top-down world of work but it is an important concept and it's a very liberating concept because usually we're trying to do the teaching and training with far too few people to do the job far too many things to learn we have to enlist everybody as a teacher everybody as an author and that way we can actually get the job done however you know it's just a little bit of pragmatism here I don't know if anybody's ever heard of this 991 rule but it does apply quite well now given the choice to write blog entries write articles for Wikipedia create new forum postings I don't know all of those sorts of things one person in 100 seems to do it and that seems to be a reasonably permanent rule in the sense that it seems to apply across all of those different media 9 out of 100 are enthusiastic enough confident enough to comment on the blog postings make a little change to an entry in the Wikipedia or some other or Wikipedia or generally act as a contributor in modifying and creating debate about content the other 90% are passive consumers of that content who are very happy to be passive consumers of it I'm going to say passive they may well be thinking about it very hard and have views and opinions but they don't actually get involved in the process so we have to be aware that we're not suddenly going to find if there are 1000 people in the organisation we're going to have 1000 people creating content we're not we're going to get the 1% who are actually going to create content but that's still an awful lot more than we have at the moment now I'm very optimistic because I've been involved quite a bit in doing collaborative distance learning courses over the last five or six years and I do believe that you can actually people can actually be moulded through encouragement and opportunity to become one of the synthesisers or the creators in other words you can actually build if people, I don't know whether Gillies found this on her course is that if people make regular forum postings or blog postings and everything else of a collaborative distance learning course will they then leave the environment of that course and do that when there's no longer a constraint on them to do it or a pressure on them to do that I'd like to think that people will gradually become more confident contributors so the 991 rule will somehow get much better percentages there and of course the people coming through now you might ask yourself about your next generation on from yourselves and would they conform to those rules or would they actually be very well very enthusiastic contributors so who has the skills well I did this aspects of this presentation a number of events earlier this year I actually got people to say well what skills do you have in all sorts of media creation activities and I asked them to rate themselves I haven't got time to do it now but you could do it in your head and say well you know are you a professional enthusiast an improver a beginner or a virgin they were my terms five stars down to one in doing all of these things that you can see listed on the screen there and what I was hoping to prove for my experiment because like all good experiments I knew what I wanted to prove from it wasn't actually what came out of it was that people would rate themselves very lowly on these particular scales but that their children or children they knew would be rated extremely highly on it in other words to conform to the sort of the expectation that people coming through Gen Y and millennials and what have you are actually much more confident media creators in fact we found that there was there was already masses of media creation capability skill in an audience of people that were from boomers down through the generation it was very surprising a lot of that is because we've got computers at home and we do things on them which are much more interesting and adventurous than we do at the world of work and we are beginning to develop these skills and now we might be wondering why do we have to spend 15 to 20 thousand pounds to have an hour of e-learning created when I could actually do this myself and it's a good question for me so one of the projects that I had a lot of fun doing last year in 2007 was a project called the 60 minute masters and this came out of a sort of international project we had we undertook using a wiki where we asked involved a lot of different learning designers around the world and said well if we want actually to have more people capable of creating content, rapid content but they only had an hour to learn all the skills needed to do it what would we teach what were the key messages that we'd include and we'd call this the 60 minute masters in instructional design by the way there was some really negative reaction from instructional designers even the daring to suggest that it was possible to teach such skills in as little as one hour but that was rather an enjoyable form of interaction, I didn't have a problem with that but we did get a number of people contributed to something like 10 or 15 people who were the the 9% rather than the 1% who contributed to this process and we did actually on this wiki called the 60 minute masters we did actually come up with a curriculum for a 60 minute course in instructional design now if we have more time I actually would have asked that question and actually asked you to think for yourselves what you would put in there and I don't know whether we do have much time do we no we don't but you might like to think in your head what sort of things that you would bring up but just to give you an idea these were some of the things that people came up with I'm sure you need to write this down I'm sure you get a copy of this presentation but it's interesting to see that what people came up with was not particularly earth shattering or revolutionary they were all things that sort of fairly sensible pieces of advice about things that could actually be covered in an hour's course and you know we did actually go on from that to create several examples of that as a piece of training it's a 60 minute course by the way it was originally called the 30 minute masters I don't know if anybody knows the story of 30 minute masters which is just to show that you know the worst thing you can do is when experts are asked to come up with to summarise what it is that they know they always teach too much they always put too much content in so we broke our own rule and had 60 minutes worth rather than 30 minutes worth a bit of an embarrassing but in a way quite illuminating but quite a few hundreds I've probably several thousand people now have taken that course and it's a bit of fun if you'd like to have a look at it but it's a completely free project but it's interesting it's an interesting endeavour in its own right now what I'm usually faced with is learning technology professionals, people who design it for living saying that's all very well Clive you know it's democratising the whole process of content allowing everybody in on an hour game but as professionals where does that leave us or what I say is go back to that high end stuff and ask yourself are you doing things like this I'm just going to page through these I won't insult you by reading them out and then you ask them the question well as a professional e-learning developer how much of your work really is like that and that's the embarrassing question because most of the time it's not their fault most of the time people who've gone into this with a huge amount of skill and education of their own are being asked to produce what is essentially the same boring boring for them, hopefully not the learner rapid content that really should be produced further down that the pyramid when their professional skills will be much better devoted and be much more challenging, much more interesting if they were actually doing things which were actually pushing things forward things that actually as I was saying earlier were quite common in the 1980s which have practically disappeared in the year in the current decade very disappointingly well not completely disappeared because obviously we're doing some of these things but an awful lot of e-learning content is still of essentially what I would say rapid content but sold at Hollywood prices I don't think I've got time for the reality check but just to say that it's all very well asking people to to change and start contributing to bottom up content and actually start making things for the benefit of other employees but they need the means, the motive and they need the opportunity and that is essentially like the same things that a good criminal needs the same thing that an e-learning developer needs so you can't just expect this to happen people aren't just suddenly going to start producing content in organisations rapid content or bottom up content because they have to be given some skills they have to be given the time, the authority there has to be some reward in it for them and that doesn't just happen just like that so if you don't actually create the right culture supported it won't happen at all so going back to did anybody get that right by the way in binary terms you see those of you who learnt binary in school back many years ago that in fact an awful lot has changed in terms of the opportunities unfortunately not as much has changed in terms of what we've actually done with those opportunities as we'd like and so like Gillie as an eternal optimist which I'm absolutely determined to maintain that perspective in spite of all the obstacles as an eternal optimist I believe that we will start to see a rapid taking up of the opportunities we've got available to us and we will actually see it's not the end of Hollywood content or top quality content but the Hollywood content will be really really top quality it will deliver the mass market needs for good educational content but we'll begin to see far more people all teachers and trainers and ultimately all employees all students if you're looking in the education context will all be contributors to the process of developing knowledge which they can share with each other and that I think is the opportunity that lies ahead over the next 5 or 10 years so thank you very much everybody yeah sure right we've got a time for a couple of questions back there I'm wondering if the the high end content and the advanced content is the sort of thing that's going to be taken over by the publishers of the world and the universities will be left with the low end user generated content and perhaps you might want to comment on I think that would be a great change I have worked a little bit with educational publishers and I've worked with publishers who produce material that's sold if you like as off the shelf product within the corporate area as well and on the whole I've found them extremely disappointing in many respects because they don't understand the educational process well enough to be able to produce content that's actually engaging and people might actually learn from and after all they still they don't have that in house they've got to go out and get that that expertise unfortunately they don't necessarily do a very good job of it so I'm a little I think it would be a great shame if that was to happen because you don't need a lot of money to produce top end content but you do need if you don't have money you need time and expertise and the will to make it happen but one of the dangers I feel that one of the worries I would have in the educational sector and I'm an outsider here would be that if you don't collaborate on those activities then you're always trying you know it's always going to be a much smaller endeavour than if you were working on a country wide basis or an international basis to produce really wonderful content that could be shared across millions of people perhaps rather than just a few thousand so it's difficult because I understand the decentralisation of teaching and training is a very long established concept that some things are better coordinated they don't have to be coordinated by corporations and publishing companies they can be coordinated otherwise but if you're going to get over the problem that the publishers have all the money and you don't you've got to get together and combine your forces I think get the very best experts together Well we'll bring this session to a close then on behalf of all we have a couple of gifts to our speakers can I ask you all to thank both our speakers this afternoon for a very interesting session thank you all very much