May 24, 2013

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Finding and then helping excellence into the world

July 28, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Continuing the quest to uncover those hidden gems of brilliant content, methods, tools and getting them into the light:  In business, education, human development, art, community outreach, and all conceivable endeavors, … all the projects described here are part of this, and in service of this effort.  Sometimes, I find them, sometimes they find me. Some further examples:

The “Peak Purpose” program from Pikes Peak Learning, my other company, about career planning, life purpose, and answering the questions, “Who Am I, Where Am I Going, How Will I Get There?”  The content, assessments, planning tools, rich databases, and entire process was developed by Sam Kirk of Sam Kirk and Associates of Denver, longtime career counselors for individuals and corporations.  Sam is now retired, and a few years ago, we adapted his pencil-and-paper programs for online, interactive – where they’ve helped thousands of youth and adults across the U.S.

In the early days of the web, I led the teams that created Hewlett-Packard’s “Educator’s Corner” – a web site that still exists 16 years later, serving content, education, community, equipment, and news for engineering students, universities, professors, departments, and engineering education initiatives around the world.  We were doing cloud computing, social media, and making new innovative content before anyone knew what those were!

Filed Under: Art of Writing, Blog Posts, e-Learning and Online Education, Human, Personal, Professional Development, Life Purpose in a Changing World, Small Biz, User Experience, What I'm working on now, Youth Life Skills Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Bringing Excellence Online, Part 3 of 3: Deploy it to the World

May 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Here’s the third stage of building bridges for excellent material to find its way into the world successfully and effectively.
3. Deploy it to the world: now that you’ve created the content – or adapted it, linked to it, or otherwise got your virtual hands on it – and you’re convinced that it’s relevant, effective, and provides meaningful value for a specific target audience; and you’ve brought that content online with a winning user experience and creative approaches to automating it, now it’s time to make it available to the world. And that’s the magic and power of the Internet: to take what was once unknown and local and instantly make it accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. Of course, “instant” still requires considerable work.

* User and access management: this content or program that you’ve now automated will require some careful decisions about how real people will access it and interact with it. Is it free? Will users pay? Will they give up something in return, but not necessarily cash, like their email address or some feedback? You can provide open access and let any and all visitors have at it. You’ll be admired for your trust and generosity. But chances are, you have some objectives of your own here, and you’re not doing this for entirely altruistic reasons. Do you want to build a community? Make money? Get exposure or build traffic? Get people to engage with you, for a variety of reasons? Depending on your answers to those questions, you’ll need to set up individual accounts, e-commerce, registration mechanisms, and the right means of giving visitors access and tracking them. Do some research here, learn what others have done – you’ll find many creative solutions.

* Set up and run your business operations: what business entity will be responsible for publishing and supporting this content? In addition to the core content, you’ll be managing a larger context for this endeavor. This starts with the web site where people will find and learn about you and the business. How will they find it? The business and the interactive product must be presented with the right use of branding, positioning, messaging, and marketing — of course, all these business and operational fundamentals follow from the early work done to establish clear value and effective learning outcomes.

Much online content is now free – partly driven by large institutions willing to open their existing learning assets, and partly to invest in the development of new assets. Plus, a massive volume of learning materials – ebooks, articles, how-to’s, courses, webinars, presentations, video, podcasts, and many other forms – are produced for marketing purposes, to get people to sign up for a blog or website, to promote a product or service, to establish a brand, or to keep users coming back for the next installment. The volumes and types of free stuff are ever increasing, but the quality is too often marginal, or outright plagiarized. Don’t fall in that trap.

In the end, this is all about adoption: getting your target users to find you, learn what you offer, become interested, and decide to engage. Since the earliest publicly available e-learning – not the old “computer based training” mandated by our jobs and bosses – the challenge of adoption has been the key to distance learning success. And it includes all the aspects described in this article and the two previous ones:

Bringing Excellence Online, Part 1 of 3: Knowledge Transfer

Bringing Excellence Online, Part 2 of 3: Rendering and Automation

Filed Under: e-Learning and Online Education, Featured, Interactive Onboarding, Small Biz, User Experience Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Bringing Excellence Online, Part 2 of 3: Rendering and Automation

May 15, 2012 By Leave a Comment

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Here’s the second of the three stages of bridge-building from flat land to the interactive, internetworked world.

Step 2 of 3 – Bring it online: if all the research and soul searching above on Who, Why, and How doesn’t knock you out of the game, now you must roll up your sleeves and do the real work of creating and deploying the thing. If this interactive thing you’re creating is only an idea, or a rough version only selectively prototyped, you have considerable work to do. If you’ve implemented a more complete interactive system, you’re much further down the path, but you may still have much labor in front of you.

* Rendering and automation: look at and use almost any interactive system or software or web site or learning tools – at some point, before they were interactive, they existed in some other form. Artists, illustrators, graphic designers, programmers, and user interface experts took printed materials or flowcharts or technical descriptions and from those, authored a new and more dynamic version of what existed before. There are so many brilliant examples: from old board games like Yahtzee and Scrabble and chess, to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and thousands of other examples in business, education, recreation, government, research, science — any human endeavor now benefits from automation and rendering interactive what used to be flat and static. Any intellectual property – including YOURS – has many opportunities to become more engaging, easier to use, more accessible, crunch data, help users interact, and much more.

* Integration and context: okay, you’ve hired the best user interface designers and your interactive thing is now slick and smooth and intuitive, or you’ve tested it a hundred ways to Toledo and fixed it every time a user got stuck or pissed and now it’s much better, thank you – well, good job. All that is essential, and not sufficient. You’re not done: no interactive program or system or tool or resource is used in isolation. Those happy users touch a hundred different systems every day, and randomly bounce between them. What environment do they work in? What platform and operating system and computer device and Internet pipe do they prefer, or are forced into? How will they get data and personal bits into and out of this system of yours?

* User experience: the most clever ideas, the best solutions for real problems, and well-conceived interactive systems that could be truly useful end up being none of these if they’re not usable. If the path to the treasure winds through endless dark catacombs that circle back on themselves with no discernible landmarks, and important looking doors are locked or unmarked, or if hallways reach dead ends, users and paying customers will go elsewhere. Our attention spans become shorter and shorter, at the same time that alternatives to any crappy user interface are a single, silent, invisible click way. Those are called “abandons” and the vast majority of ALL visits to ALL web sites end that way – unless you turn up the lights, create landmarks, make hallways straight, and follow real users around to be sure you got it right.

Next: Deploying, product-izing, monetizing, conversions, and adoption in the real world

Filed Under: e-Learning and Online Education, Featured, Interactive Onboarding, Small Biz, User Experience Tagged With: , , , , ,

Bringing Excellence Online, Part 1 of 3: Knowledge Transfer

May 5, 2012 By Leave a Comment

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We build bridges – from ideas, sketches, rough content, personally-held knowledge, organizational intellectual property to tangible, usable, accessible online systems. Here’s the first of three stages of that process…

Step 1 of 3 – Create the content, transfer the knowledge: in many cases, the content already exists in some form, possibly as a program developed and used within a company or school or even a home. It’s created to fill a need by a motivated person, and it may never see use or exposure beyond the quiet, local, remote usage it was intended for. But occasionally, the author recognizes it has value, or others reflect that through their success with it or simply seeing it in action. Now, the author is faced with a decision: how to package, or re-package it, how to document and ensure that it works, and who “out there” will likely benefit from it?

In some cases, the content may not exist in a tangible form, it may be embedded in an organization or process or someone’s head. Now, it’s time to facilitate a process to model it, articulate it, and create an information architecture. This includes the target user or audience, the goals or objectives of the content, media types needed, and a comprehensive approach to get it written down so we can work with it.

* Effectiveness: unfortunately, there’s a lot of crap out there. The trend towards evidence-based development, more rigorous research, development of educational standards, and enlisting independent, qualified third parties to evaluate materials, systems, tools, methods, and applications is gradually weeding out the ineffective and unproven, and placing higher standards on what gets to market. Any author or content owner looking for a wider audience or new market must ask: does the content or material produce the intended outcome, and how do I test and demonstrate that?

* Relevance: a product or program or content can be effective and produce the outcomes it claims, but does anyone care? What need or pain does the thing address, and is that pain acute and widespread? Is this a solution looking for a problem, a product looking for a customer, or does it answer burning questions that don’t have answers now? This, of course, is a fundamental business question, but authors or educators or artists not familiar with market basics can become too enamored of their baby, and be too close to their project to be able to objectively assess its relevance – or simply not have the skills, experience, or tools to research it sufficiently.

* Target audience: intricately interwoven with the two challenges above – and all three of these are inseparably interdependent – is the essential question of, “who is this for?” The answer to that must include a number of factors, including their technical environment, education level, access to funds (depending on price), and most importantly, exacting what problem will they solve with this, and how will that happen exactly? As with all definitions in this realm, complete answers must include an accurate assessment of scale (how many people will need and use it?), and what’s the trend (is that group growing or shrinking, or might they vanish overnight due to some temporary condition in the world today)?

Next: Part 2 of 3, Bring It Online

Filed Under: e-Learning and Online Education, Featured, Interactive Onboarding, Small Biz, User Experience Tagged With: , , , , ,

This here blog, and leaping without nets

February 23, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Getting this blog rolling here in early 2012 and connecting to the blogosphere  is a plunge into the global streams of creative people and communities in my various fields of interest.  It requires adapting my own lifestyle and time management to align with that: my previous blogs were driven by ulterior motives, to generate new sales leads, to improve search engine traffic, and to promote and positive particular companies and brands.  This one here is different – it’s about the art of participating in the worldwide community, engaging good ideas and creative endeavors, learning, sharing, and simply “putting it all out there to see where it goes.”  It’s a bit of leaping without a net – but some forms of Providence are only revealed by leaping, there’s no other way!  The precipice is exhilarating.

Filed Under: Art of Writing, Blog Posts, e-Learning and Online Education, Human, Personal, Professional Development, Life Purpose in a Changing World, Small Biz, User Experience, What I'm working on now, Youth Life Skills Tagged With: , ,

Develop and deploy an online “venture university”

January 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment

For small and medium sized business operators: Many, perhaps the majority, of entrepreneurs and small business people strike out on their own to pursue new ventures based on a their passion for an art, a technical skill, or a particular service to their communities or their lines of business.  Most do not have the vast set of skills required to succeed: marketing, finance, capital, operations, HR, technology, sales, quality management, process development, and much more.  And they don’t have the time or the inclination to read books and articles, or the funds to hire experts to train them.  What they need are digestible, relevant, and applicable learning modules to take them step-by-step to greater success.

Venture University will provide an extensive series of courses in career exploration, fundamentals for entrepreneurial individuals looking to start new ventures, and a variety of key skills for small business folks to manage their operations and train their staff.

We’re in the funding stages of this Venture University now.

Eventually, we’ll provide a branded learning platform and process for content providers to serve these three populations.  Finally, we’ve reached a tipping point in user experience and quality content that will allow many more authors and educational developers access to the users and markets they want to serve, and for the aspiring small business owners to take advantage of it, now that it’s affordable and effective.

Filed Under: Blog Posts, e-Learning and Online Education, Human, Personal, Professional Development, Small Biz, What I'm working on now Tagged With: , , , ,

Assisting youth and small business: why?

December 24, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Why youth and small business?  Without my choosing these two populations with clear intent, the young people and the entrepreneurs continue to occupy my professional aspirations.  So I ask myself: In the process of creating usable, useful, relevant interactive learning systems, and online systems in general, why choose to serve teens entering the real world and small business people striving to succeed in that world?

My mission has long been, “Real change for real people in the real world” – if I can help entrepreneurs and small business operators grow and succeed, and help young people preparing to create their own successful lives, then I’ve gone a long way toward proving the methods, systems, content, and approaches that I provide.

Also, I’ve been part of both of those populations as an entrepreneur and as a citizen growing up in this country, and also an entrepreneur in the world of online education.   And I’ve been closing associated with both groups as a parent, part of an extended family, and husband of a public school educator.

It’s a changing world.  Interactive systems serve these groups, as a means for learning, interacting with their communities and their world, and managing daily aspects of their lives and needs.

There are about 50 million in each of these groups, ages middle school through mid twenties, and owners, operators, managers, and entrepreneurs.  Of course, both groups turn over constantly, especially the youth as kids age into and out of young adulthood, and as small businesses startup, growth, and too often, fail.  So the opportunities to serve never cease.

Filed Under: Blog Posts, Small Biz, Youth Life Skills Tagged With: , , ,

Providing small businesses with innovative marketing systems and skills

December 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Building on the venture university concept below, I’m collaborating with a startup here in Colorado Springs (Saligent) to provid small businesses with innovative marketing systems and skills to generate new leads, manage those effectively, monetize them, and eventually capture a larger share of those wallets.  This is about efficiency, learning how the buyer buys, not how to sell better, and getting a much larger return on their marketing and sales efforts by capturing the 80% of new contacts that aren’t ready to buy yet.

The core value is providing a much higher volume of close-able leads.

The challenge here is to on-board small businesses quickly and demonstrate results, while adapting and maximizing existing staff, programs, and investments.  As with all professional development in small business, getting these immedate, demonstrated results is imperative to overcoming historically (very) low adoption and retention rates with this kind of learning.

Filed Under: Blog Posts, e-Learning and Online Education, Small Biz, What I'm working on now Tagged With: , , ,