Why are weblogs so successful? Apart from being very easy to use, I feel that there are three key attributes that have contributed to its success: 1) personal point of view, 2) chronological nature and 3) byte-sized posts. Together, these three attributes help create experiences that are both engaging and memorable. In this article, I will outline a design method that incorporates these weblog attributes.

I strongly believe (and I say this to all my colleagues) that if you want to get up-to-speed in your field, just subscribe to the weblogs in your domain and read them everyday for at least six months. I can confidently say that this works as people who have tried it out tell me that they are learning a lot.

There are three important factors that make weblogs so engaging:

1) A personal point of view. This is the informal personal narrative that makes understanding easy. Since this personal narrative is in a particular domain, it makes understanding the domain relatively easy.

2) Chronological nature. Having these experiential narratives on a daily basis has its own charm. It allows you to absorb and reflect on them on a continuous basis. This allows you to be in constant touch with your practice.

3) Byte-sized posts. This compact size of the posts helps you to stay focused and thus makes understanding easy. (Most people print articles but you’ll hardly come across people printing weblog posts.)

These three factors help build a relationship between the weblogger, his/her readers and the domain. And it is in this relationship building that much learning takes place.So, if weblogs and their attributes are so useful, why aren’t they used in formal training situations? For a couple of reasons:

1) Training is still considered to be formal with specific start and end dates, and
2) Training is still perceived from a product standpoint and not from a relationship standpoint.

It will be difficult to expect a change in the training mindset anytime soon, but we can try a different approach where both the product and relationship ideas are used in tandem.

For example, consider this scenario: an organization wants to train its 200 employees on new troubleshooting procedures in under 4 weeks.

Before jumping into the gather materials>>develop product>>deliver methodology, let’s consider an alternative.

We’ll start with a practical and simple three-step design methodology: 1) intelligence gathering, 2) co-creation (design and development) and 3) facilitated engagement.

1) Intelligence gathering is the realm of design research. This is where you go out to search, inquire and observe your learners and their contexts. You determine what the needs are and under what contexts they are required.

2) In the co-creation phase you try to make sense of the collected material jointly with your learners. This is usually done by creating early prototypes and testing them with your learners.

3) In the facilitated engagement phase you get to facilitate the learning process through online community. There are many points in the above process that can be leveraged to use the three weblog attributes and build relationships. Let’s explore some of these.

The intelligence gathering phase can help build relationships between you (the designer), your learners and your domain (troubleshooting procedures). Using a simple weblog format, you can elicit requirements, outline expectations and introduce peers. This early engagement through weblogs can also help foster sociability. For example, after conducting interviews, you could put up a draft of the interview and solicit feedback. If you found a pattern in the collected documents, you could blog the pattern and seek advice on how best to use it. This way all parties involved in the intelligence gathering process are kept in the loop as to what is being discovered.

The design phase is usually the lull-phase in the traditional design process. But it need not be this way. There is a well-known fact that the people who learn the most in an e-learning design process are the instructional designers or the learning designers themselves! Why? Because they spend most of the design phase trying to make sense of the messy information they collected earlier. But what if they could share some of the learning with the learners? For example, sending “Concept Blasts” via e-mail to learners on a daily basis where a single concept is defined and illustrated (designed) will help build a sense of continuous engagement. Sharing collected stories and deconstructing documents can be other daily activities. In this phase, content is co-created with learners. Also note that the content is not created as a single product; rather it is created in chunks to be facilitated through dialog in the next phase.

The facilitated engagement phase is wrongly considered the “delivery” phase in the traditional design process. It should be a facilitated engagement phase. In such a phase, a learning support team facilitates the learning using the content developed specifically for this purpose in the design phase. Usually one or two facilitators along with a “community historian” who documents the trials and tribulations of the engagement drive this phase in a “community of practice” style. This phase does have a start and finish date but as relationships have already been built in the previous phases the learning and the experience can be more engaging. In addition, the content can even be facilitated through games. (see Thiagi Sivasailam’s website for more on e-mail games).

In conclusion, I would like to stress that the informal and engaging attributes of the weblog format can be used even in the light of tightly scheduled and highly focused training situations. The simple alternatives outlined in this paper can liberate us from the tyranny of product-oriented delivery and help us build continuous, engaging and memorable learning experiences.