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April 23, 2003
Turning a traditional live classroom into a virtual — or as we put it — wired seminar is not a trivial task. Instructors are sometimes frustrated that they cannot lecture, and we normally discourage PowerPoint shows converted into webpages — that doesn't result in much learning, either. So one has to find new ways of engaging learners separated by distance and time. That's what we do.

The "we" in the above paragraph consists of Frank Greenagel and Suzanne Lagay. By getting to this website, you've probably spoken with one of us, or to someone who has. We're spending a lot of our time working with organizations thinking about going online with their training. To provide those organizations with support and a rationale for our suggestions affecting the design and operation of a virtual community of practice (which is, after all, what they are building), we felt we needed to put some of our own resources and thinking online.

The site was designed for seminar sponsors and developers, instructional designers, and senior management in training and development (in pretty much that order). We work with people who want to emphasize the development of competencies. Our "space" lies at the juncture of e-Learning and communities of practice, and our emphasis is on the practical, not the theoretical or the speculative. There'll be something new here every month, including pre-publication of provocative white papers, so we invite you to join us.

June 10, 2003
Our wired seminars did not grow out of a fascination with Internet technologies, but from our experience and from research into learning and learning communities. It has long been understood by most academics that the classroom is simply not very effective for teaching most students any real competencies, whether those competencies lie in history, psychology, writing, or the more precise disciplines of doing physics and math. The information transmission model of instruction, exemplified by the lecture and, increasingly, the PowerPoint show, has no theoretical basis nor any research to show it is effective, but does have the virtue of tradition and scalability behind it.

Recent research suggests that perhaps as much as 80% of all workplace competencies are not learned from formal instruction, but acquired gradually by actually doing the work, conversing with co-workers, participating in all the activities of the workplace — indeed, from shooting the bull at the watercooler. This form of learning is called tacit learning, and most people don't realize they are acquiring it until they seem to know stuff they never were taught. The closest models for a relatively systematic approach to learning the tacit knowledge of a field are the apprenticeship programs of the skilled trades, the internships of the medical profession, and the lab assistantships in scientific research. Guided Learning has developed an instructional design that borrows heavily from those models, and uses the Internet to reach an audience widely scattered and often unable to attend regular classes because of work schedules. The communication and collaboration applications available via the web provide enhanced ability to increase the interaction among peers.

Our wired seminars are different from traditional seminars in several respects:
    •  Organized around specific work-related competencies, not topics
    •  Built upon work-related experiences and activities, not lectures or readings
    •  Allow competencies to develop over an extended period of time
    •  Seek to create and nurture learning communities as an essential component
        of the learning process, just as practice and reinforcement are
    • Often result in the emergence of a community of practice, which provides
        continuing interaction and support that survives the end of the seminar

The tradeoff for this approach is that our wired seminars are not scalable – there is probably an upper limit of 30 participants per seminar, and the learning cannot be crammed into an intensive, week-long “boot camp.” The learning takes place largely asynchronously, but participants progress through the activities of the apprenticeship as part of a learning cohort. There is considerable individualization in the selection of projects to work on, but also considerable structure to keep the cohort together.

The critical skills in a wired seminar are those of the instructional designer and the seminar moderator – the individual who participants will interface with on a frequent basis by means of email, instant messaging, threaded discussions and teleconferencing. That individual should have solid web competencies as well as substantial subject matter expertise, but is not an instructor in the traditional sense. Essentially all of these instructional design principles might be applied with equal benefit to a live seminar or college classroom, but instructors have to accept that their role is largely to create experiences and activities from which participants can construct their own understanding and skills, and to coach and reinforce appropriate participant behaviors. That's not a huge change for instructors in some disciplines, but it's a cataclysmic one for most.

October 10, 2004
We've come to the realization that we've actually been spending more time with community colleges than with for-profit seminar developers. Our focus has been at least as much on assisting college teachers to explore alternatives to lecturing as on the use of web-based communication and collaboration tools. Though the markets are different, there is a core competency underlying both activities: success in getting teachers to really look at how people learn.

We all know, of course, that not everyone learns the same way, and that different competencies are learned through different activities. The challenge we put to every instructor might be stated thus: How would you teach this with your mouth shut? After the uproar dies down and the sputtering objections are set aside for the moment, we get down to the serious business of looking at the key determinants: prior knowledge, the competency, what kind of practice you can provide, reinforcement, and measurement.

There is no single learning model we try to direct instructors towards — we assist them in considering alternatives to lecturing and reading assignments and in devising ways of evaluating learners' competencies.