I’m not sure of her intent, or for that matter, her background in learning, and I would agree that the profession is in danger, but more as a result of the evangelicism, quick fixes, get the bucks and run,arrogance,and faddishness of the profession.

One of Bacal’s Laws is: The lower the barrier is to enter a profession, the more lowly the entrants into the profession will be.

Couple that with increased anti-intellectualism in our society, where formal learning is suspect and is it so surprising that people in the profession start to look like clowns? And lose the distinction between form and function?

Some, like E. Masie, are in fact, probably rich clowns. Still.

It’s not about the technology adoption, or lack there of. The story about the overhead seems to have been a visual metaphor for the conference (and the profession) as a whole. Gina references this in a later comment in her post, and the feeling was echoed by many other people I follow. I wasn’t there, so I can’t claim first hand knowledge of the particular event, nor the feeling one got from ASTD ICE.

What resonated with me, however, was that the image portrayed of ASTD ICE was eerily similar to my own experiences with workplace learning professionals in general. Now I’m going post a disclaimer here that my use of ‘we’ and ‘the profession’ is very broad based. I know that there are people out there who ‘get it’ and are excluded from my generalizations. But my experience is very much in alignment with Robert’s notion that a fair percentage of the profession is populated with people who have limited knowledge of, or interest in, fundamental learning theory. I’ve misplaced the actual numbers, but David Merrill once stated that most of the profession were “instructional designers by assignment” – meaning they had been moved into positions of creating instruction, rather than educated to do so.

I’ve been in the profession for nearly 20 years. In that time the central messages coming from the industry haven’t changed – how to get a seat at the table, how to report on business impact vs. training volume, how to design effective instruction. Further, benchmarks like ASTD’s State of the Industry are published with little or no analysis of the results. In his review on TrainingIndustry.com, Doug Harward notes that data showing net training hours per employee increased between 2007 and 2008. And that the training cost per hour consumed increased by 34% over 2007. Are these good things? There is no call to action from ASTD based on the report.

Which brings me back to my earlier point; I don’t think Gina’s comments (or Tony’s, or so many others) are really about the technology use, or non-use – i.e. get up to speed, you dinosaurs. I think they are struggling to find a way to communicate that our profession is at risk; that we are becoming, to a large extent, obsolete. The constant cries from the profession about being ignored, to Robert’s point, is of our own doing. And if we don’t take some action to correct this, we will be gone.

This revelation doesn’t seem to be generating any urgency, or sense of acknowledgement, from the industry. Instead, based on evidence of ‘award winning’ and leading edge thinking found at conferences such as ASTD ICE, we seem content to live with our old models and do things at our own pace. Or, far worse, focus so heavily on efficiency (rapid eLearning, etc.) that we fail to question whether we are producing products that will have any business impact. While business may reap the benefits of expense reduction in the near term, both of these responses continue to promote the perception that we are out of touch with our organizations and have nothing of value to offer them.

So instead of focusing on Gina’s comments about the use of an overhead, or the profession’s ‘interest’ in the technology of the month, how do we address the fundamental issues that are killing the profession? How do we get the attendee’s of an ASTD-type conference to pull their heads out of the ground and take action? How do we get workplace learning professionals to start acting like it – to stop being order takers, engage organizations in development of impactful learning, integrate learning within the work flow, and finally start showing business impact? (See Clive Shepherd’s recent rant on this.)

It’s simple! Choose the tools that are most suited for the job and the objectives. Be aware of the limitations, both technological and human, of learning technologies, or else you’ll end up with the same thing that happened with television.

In the 50s and 60s there was huge excitement about how television would take over the teacher’s role and that education would be wonderfully enriched. So thousands of televisions and stands were purchased, only to be used very rarely. And of course television is essentially, now a huge wasteland, with only a tiny percent allocated to learning.

It didn’t change education. Or learning. It ended up, as all pop technologies do, as lowest common denominator, which is what is going to happen to the social learning stuff.

Thanks again.

I am a technical trainer, and I do love all of the new fangled technology. I tweeted during the entire ASTD conference. But I am concerned, conflicted, not sure what the right word is to describe my apprehension over the borderline evangelistic nature of a lot of the sessions I attended. Even Tony’s talk had me worried. What makes me feel this way is the constant haranguing that Gen X, Y and Millennials expected to be trained using FaceBook, My Space and Twitter. Really? Do they really spend their K-12 years seeing more than PowerPoint presentations? I am a member of Gen X, and I remember overhead projectors and filmstrips. I worked for a school district in the Curriculum and Development department during the late 80s and early 90s, and I don’t remember the curriculum being developed during this time period being all that different than when I was in school. I went to college in the late 90s – pretty much lecture there too. I would really love to hear from K-12 teachers to get confirmation that their students expect or rather demand to do their learning in Second Life. According to Tony and many of the speakers at the ASTD conference, they do. And shame on the trainer who isn’t “with it.”

Does this mean that I think we as trainers should ignore all of the possibilities technology offers to us and to our participants? No, but this harping on using FaceBook, Second Life, or Twitter and to avoid the lecture at all costs feels to me very much like the push for whole language or inventive math in elementary schools in the 80s and 90s. Did/Does it truly educate, enlighten, or make a positive impact on behavior? Are we focused too much on the latest fad and missing the real focus of why we have been hired as trainers or workplace learning professionals?