2012 - The Year of the LMS

I guess I never thought I'd hear myself say that.  But something strange is afoot in the Learning Management Software market.  With the shift of the internet from 1.0 to 2.0, and beyond, it was easy to envision a world no longer needing the LMS of old.  So the question remains.  What does the new incarnation of the LMS look like?  Or does it just go away?

I'll admit that I've often ignored the LMS market. I've always been very interested in LEARNING, and management systems just never really had much to do with learning.  The early systems had everything to do with tracking, recording, reporting, and monitoring.  These are all business functions that need to occur  at some level and so these systems do serve a purpose.  I will readily admit that.  But rarely does an LMS have anything to do with instructional design.  But maybe that's about to change.

I don't have any links to stories that back me up on this, but I get a strange feeling that 2012 is the year we begin to see major changes in the LMS market.  And I'm not talking about the continuing mergers, and acquisitions in this space.  I'm thinking about a new breed of Learning Management Systems/Software. Perhaps someone figures out how to convert social engagement into tangible learning points, or other type of corporate currency that proves, or identifies, competency.  But, honestly, I'm just not sure what that means, or what it might look like.  I know some of you do.  Because I know you're out there working on it.

Maybe the LMS finally gets completely sucked into Talent Management software and course completions simply become part of your HR file...as many do already.  And maybe the big story will be that there IS no story: Every possible LMS either dies or gets acquired into HR or other management software.  And maybe what that means is that instructional designers need to start seeing the bigger picture.  If the enterprise is pulling together all these, once separate, software systems into something called Talent Management, then maybe there needs to be a hybrid study of Talent Systems Design.

What do you think?

And Happy Holidays!!!

Learning from the Alpha Geeks

I was listening to lullabot podcast episode#33 this morning and found the discussion very interesting. Lullabot is a company that specializes in Drupal (opensource content management system) development/workshops/training. I stopped listening a while ago when I stopped working with Drupal. But now that I'm back into the OpenSource world I put them back into iTunes and the GoogleReader.

Learning, DIY, and DoOcracy:
Alpha geeks are the ones that truly get DIY learning, Communities of Practice, Learning2.0, etc. Its simply amazing, as a learning professional, to listen to them talk about how they create their learning environments utilizing existing technologies to share and learn from each other. Nobody talks about ADDIE models. Nobody talks about pedagogy. They talk about the DoOcracy. I LOVE THAT! It's my new favorite word. To them, learning is about doing, failing, and doing again. So when you get a bunch of people into a virtual space to share the learning experience of DO-Fail-DO, repeat...you have a DO-ocracy. Everyone can participate, at different levels, and anyone can create a lesson. It's all about defining a new goal to create something, bringing people together, and just going for it. Its very much like the idea of UNconferences.

Tips for listening to the podcast as a learning professional:
Fastforward through the first part of the podcast and get to the interview...then ff through the first part of the interview until you hear them talking about the drupaldojo. If you are not a drupal user or a techno-geek, then try to ignore the techno-jargon and just listen to how they talk about the dojo, the phylosophy, the how and why it works, and the passion.

Other opensource learning stuff:
If you are interested then you should also check out DrupalEd.
DrupalEd is an active community of Educators using drupal for educational purposes. They are currently updating the site, but groups.drupal is going strong.

I've also seen some interesting work being done to integrate Drupal and MOODLE and Elgg. And OpenID efforts should help the login process across multiple systems as well.

The learning ecosystems are coming together nicely...stay tuned.