Training Companies Books

I not only would recommend it to all, I will buy many copies and give them as gifts to friends I know need exercise that is easy and fun to do.

On the other hand, Virtual learning is a sales brochure of the services Roger Schank's company, Institute for the Learning Sciences (ILS) offers for organisations. For example, the cases offer convincing references of satisfied customers of ILS. A cynical reader might suspect that only the successful projects are included and the lukewarm cases forgotten. Had Schank included two or three cases outside his own business history, the book would make a much better case.

Schank tries to apply his own theses in this book. Instead of providing lists of things to remember he tells stories and presents experiences from the field. He does not give ready-made answers but encourages readers to try things out themselves. Yes, Virtual learning is an antithesis of a traditional coursebook.

I have not found any virtual learning book to be fully satisfactory, but this one provides a very fine start. I completely agree with the author's opening premise that organizational learning is adrift and largely bankrupt intellectually (and what is being spent in dollars is largely being spent in a mindless and counter-productive fashion).

The seven core ideas that I drew from it are:

1) Learn by doing. Training must be fully integrated into day-to-day responsibilities and available on the fly.

2) Expert Modeling. Web-developers, multi-media experts, all these folks are *useless* unless there is a cadre of proven subject-matter-experts who can be used to devise the substance of the training in an interactive fashion.

3) Survey before modeling. Apart from having experts integrated into the design team, a larger survey of experts prior to the module design is recommended.

4) Embed failure. The author is a leading proponent of the idea that the best lessons are those that are learned from failing. They are, in a word, memorable.

5) Provide options. Building on the learning that occurs from failure, the author proposes strong emphasis on options menus that allow students to branch in different directions immediately after the failure.

6) Include ambiguity. The author suggests that avoidance of the "school solution" is helpful--there should be no one answer, but degrees of answer.

7) Prototype and test draft module. As obvious as it might seem, the author's experience suggests that too often distance learning modules go straight into production without being tested on real students, something he considers essential.

Missing from the book, which could do with a new edition, is a directory of virtual learning success stories apart from the author's own experience, and of virtual learning tools. I would be especially interested in an appendix with a cross-section of URLs for successful distance learning examples across the various university degree areas as well as in vocational training.

The book did inspire me to conceptualize virtual training and distance learning as a new means of managing corporate knowledge. I am very disenchanted with the years of nonsense coming from those championing "knowledge management" and as my own interests have moved toward collaborative work, external source exploitation, and organizational intelligence, I have come to the conclusion that a good strategy for any organization interested in perpetuating and leveraging its internal knowledge would be to take a distance learning approach that integrates a weekly open source intelligence report on the state of the knowledge segment; a distance learning menu related to that knowledge segment; an expert forum where completion of the distance learning is required before participating; and a virtual library of internal and external sources structured for efficient use. The next step would be to expand the circle and share the burden with other organizations, ultimately creating an information commons for that specific knowledge segment.

This is a good book, and helpful to anyone wishing to reflect on how the future calls for continuous education, learning by doing, and doing by learning.

AAA provides not only an analytical framework for organisational change, but - more importantly - an extensive and concrete manual for implementation.

When you've done enough reading on the subject and have to actually DO something, get this book.

Of special note was the free Knowledge Management & Process Improvement Software included with the book.

The expected outcome of area activity analysis is cultural change (starting with renaming teams to reflect their real roles as service providers), focusing the mission on service, defining clear activity descriptions for which the teams are responsible, determining how to measure team effectiveness, establishing service-related performance standards and restructuring reward systems.

Using a seven phase approach, the book leads you through the entire process of transforming to "natural work teams". The first three phases are foundational, and consist of (I) preparations for the activity analysis, (II) developing service-oriented mission statements for the functional areas (not easily done), (III) defining the activities for each area.

Phase IV is the pivot point during which you develop customer relationships. Customers can be internal customers of the activity or external customers. In this respect there is a set of classifications that need to be performed for the activities themselves, which are: Real-Value-Added (RVA), which provide value as seen through the eyes of the activity's customer; Business-Value-Added (BVA), which may be necessary to support internal business functions, but provide no direct benefit to the activity's customer, and No-Value-Added (NVA), which are not essential to business functions, nor do they add any perceivable value to customers. This information is used in Phase V to determine the efficiency of the activity. It is also worth noting at this point that the what authors call "activities" are processes and process chains, so you may have to either adopt his vocabulary or mentally translate as you read. This is not a criticism of the book, however, because the approach is valuable and will enable you to classify activities in accordance with their value characteristics and determine if they are optimum for their intended use. Phase VI entails developing supplier partnerships. This is applicable to both external supply chain partners as well as internal activities. An example of an internal supplier partnership, taken from my profession, is services provided by IT to end users (usually codified in service level agreements and comprised of service level objectives). The final phase, VII, addresses continuous improvement. An added bonus is the CD ROM that comes with the book contains an application called WorkDraw, which is a process modeling tool with many of the same features as Micrografx iGrafx Process.

As an IT professional who works extensively on projects for service level management and IT-Business alignment I found this book to be a gem. In fact, the service-orientation of the "natural work teams" has changed my thinking about how to structure an ideal IT organization, and has also greatly influenced my thinking about how to manage service delivery. The book earns 5 solid stars and my highest recommendation.

Mr. Dogan has organized the necessary basic instrument information in a manner that uses the FAA suggested "building block" method of instruction. He makes it easy for the instructor to follow a training outline and allows the student to absorb small bite size bits of information, arrange those bits into understandable usable procedures, and then to correllate them into a meaningful operational pattern of flying that provides for complete and safe operations.

The use of "To the CFI-I" at the end of each chapter is particularily helpful for the Instrument Instructor as he or she progresses through the flight training with a student. At the very least, these sections develop disscussion areas for the training environment.

I think the author needed to either write a longer book and better develop the characters and story or pare his effort down to a smaller focus on maybe one character. As it is, he produced a not very well developed story populated by not very well developed characters. A formula for a forgettable book, in my opinion. I've read a number of excellent books about Vietnam, but I can't say I'd rate this as one of them. I really can't recommend it.

This is a concept book. Although it contains fairly specific ideas for workouts, the author is clearly trying to get the reader to rethink his/her workout, along with the whole idea of an outdoor recreationist as athlete. The book's main value is not in presenting the reader with a list of individual exercises, but in teaching the reader to apply certain concepts and develop a functional workout whose goal is to improve performance in one or more outdoor sports. In fact, some of the specific suggestions for exercise and nutrition are a bit dated, but that doesn't really detract from the book's value: the concepts still hold true, with specifics informed by more recent information.

The biggest downside to this book -- and it is a big one -- is the quality of the prose. All would-be authors repeat after me: before subverting a form, I will first understand it. Sure, standard expository writing is stodgy at times, but if you're going to chuck things like overall organization, sentence structure, and diction out the window, you damn well ought to replace them with something better. Calling Ilg's prose purple is a profound understatement: his enthusiasm for his subject, combined with a clear lack of experience as a writer, causes him to practically pitch the whole paintpot at each and every page. If that were not enough, the frequent interjection of pithy maxims by really cool people is a major irritation. I like cool quotes, too, but I question whether a book about athletic training is really enhanced by bon mots from sources such as Thoreau, T. S. Eliot, Immanuel Kant, Robert Louis Stevenson, LaRochefoucauld, etc. Quotes about the ecstatic union of mind, body, and nature are much more meaningful when they come from people who actually had such experiences, versus sitting at home and writing about them.

The book's brevity is its saving grace. Ilg's subjects are short enough that even his worst meandering -- and it is bad, very bad -- can't lead you too far astray.