Late adopters and that widening chasm

I believe it was David Lloyd George who said you can't cross a chasm in two small jumps. And for late adopters of digital technologies in learning and development, that chasm is becoming ever wider.

A chasm is a scary enough thing when it's narrow. The wider it gets, the scarier it gets. Fortunately, the technology exists to create stepping stones across the chasm.

One of the things I have noticed, talking to late adopters is that many of them are of the opinion that their target user audience isn't ready to use digital technologies as part of their working/learning day.

I'd like to address this from two angles.

First of all, digital tech is here to stay, and it's evolving all the time. At some point, the chasm will have to be crossed, and I reckon sooner is better than later. That much is pretty inevitable to both providers and consumers of learning solutions. In five or ten years' time, the learning landscape is going to look very different, and as for the learner profile..! There seems to be a general consensus that by that time, even our late adopters are going to have to be functioning in that space. One very positive aspect to being a late adopter is that you don't have to follow the path taken by the trailblazers - they made a lot of mistakes. Just check where they are now, and plot a path to join them there.

But I am seeing a tendency to postpone thinking about how they're going to get there. It is possible to introduce aspects of tech that set things in motion.

• You could digitise your happy sheets, for example. Such a small thing. 
• You could move assessments online.
• You could introduce a tip/challenge of the week sent out to mobile phones.
• User manuals/process documentation could be moved online (or if that's too scary, locally based on computers/tablets), leveraging the navigational advantages that that brings, and paving the way for a full blown point-of-need performance support tool.

Secondly, the user audience is seldom as digitally incompetent as the stakeholders seem to think. Many people, who are not regarded as being particularly digitally literate:

• Search for information using a search engine such as Google
• Have Facebook accounts
• Can take a photo with their smart phone and upload it to Facebook or send it to someone
• Can use a satnav, either a purpose-made one or on their smart phones
• Find and watch clips on YouTube
• Book flights/holidays online
• Buy their groceries online
• Buy goods from Amazon and/or eBay and pay for them via PayPal
• Access their children's VLEs in the school portal
• etc. etc.

So I think we can gently challenge the perception of the stakeholders on that score - their user audience can often do more than they're given credit for, and there's no reason why they can't start to do some of those things as part of their learning experience.

It's been a while

You may or may not have noticed that I've been out of the loop for a while.

Since I am now in a new role, where the majority of my clients are late adopters of digital learning, I thought that it would be fitting to go there my first time back in the saddle.

There seems to be an assumption that moving into the digital space is a big, scary deal. But consider the mistakes that have already been made, that the late adopter can avoid. If - that is - the late adopter is prepared to learn from the experience of those who are further down the path.

I have found, though, that some late adopters are reluctant to go that route, so they wind up dealing with poor uptake for the very reasons early adopters struggled. But the early adopters persevered and found all sorts of ways of making digital resources more engaging. The wheel has been invented. We have figured out a lot of things along the way.

We've figured out that throwing content on a screen does not constitute elearning. We've discovered that people don't actually read screens for the most part - they scan them. So we've learned to work with that.

We've figured out that workplace learning is more about what you want people to do than what you want them to know. So we've learned to design solutions accordingly.

We have moved past the idea that e-learning needs to be the complete solution. In the early days of 'blended learning', there was precious little blending going on. We were so excited with our digital goodie bag, that we abandoned everything else for a while, there. We're getting better at it now. It finally dawned on us that (and I forget who originated this expression) if you want to learn to swim, you're going to have to get wet at some point. So we learnt how to look at a learning requirement and allocate modalities as appropriate.

We figured out that throwing the boring stuff online so that we could do the cool stuff in workshops also didn't work. If it was boring when it was in a workshop, it was going to be way more boring (and way easier to opt out of) on a screen.

We've figured out how to go mobile. We can use tablets, smart phones, mp4 players... all that stuff.

We've rediscovered the value of point of need support, and figured out how to design digital performance support tools.

We've come to realise that we don't need to be precious. That the 'bloke at the next desk' is a valid and valuable resource. Some of us even factor them in to our solutions.

That's not all, but it's a pretty good start. And instead of following the trail to where the early adopters now find themselves, the late adopters can simply choose to be airlifted into that space and join the conversation. It's an exciting journey...and I'm curious as to where it's going next.

How about you?