LTAP/TTAP Clearinghouse
National LTAP/TTAP Annual Conference
Pecha Kucha – The Future of Training
July 23, 2013
Pecha Kucha – The Future of Training
RENEE: --speakers we have for the Pecha Kucha presentation. If any of you have
not heard about Pecha Kucha, this is something I found when I was doing
some research on how to liven up conferences and meetings. So what Pecha
Kucha is, Pecha Kucha is a Japanese term for chit -chat, but it’s a rapid fire,
automatically advancing slide presentation where yo u get speakers to distill
their thoughts and get right to the point in a rapid amount of time. We wanted
to get a variety of speakers from some different areas, not just LTAP or
TTAP, so thank you very much for all of your willingness and participation to
participate in this different type of presentation.
The presentations will consist of 20 slides at only allowed 20 seconds each
and the slides automatically advance on their own. We can’t use this format
for every session no, but I did keep reminding Ke n, Ken you do know that
they advance in 20 seconds right? Usually Pecha Kucha presentations you
might wonder why they have a lot of goofy images on some of the slides,
Pecha Kucha is usually done with just images. You can have text as well, so
I have just told the presenters that our topic is the future of training. I said
we are welcoming any interpretation on what you feel the future of training is.
You could have text or image slides, but you had to stick to the 20 in 20
seconds each. Just to make sure no one over-speaks, you will be forced off
the stage with the following sound—well you will be forced off the stage
either way.
Our speakers today we have Ted Green [phonetic] who is the engineering
manager of the New Jersey LTAP, we have Kevin Monaha n [phonetic] who is
a contract support project manager for the National Highway Institute, we
have David Orr [phonetic] who is a senior engineer with New York LTAPs
Cornell local roads program, Byron Bluehorse [phonetic] who’s a program
manager of the Alaska TTAP, Ken Skorseth the program manager of the
South Dakota LTAP, and Jeff Zaharewicz [phonetic] the LTAP manager for
FHWA’s technology partnership programs. Welcome to you all.
[applause]
RENEE: The presentations are already linked together, so as one completes we’ll
just have the next speaker come on up. They are going in this order that I
read. Ted come on up.
MR. TED GREEN: MOOCs, they’re the next big thing. That was the cry that went
throughout the higher education community only 3.5 years ago. Everybody
says, we have to do it. We have to get involved with a MOOC, but the big
question is, what exactly is a MOOC? So everybody’s now trying to figure
LTAP/TTAP Clearinghouse
National LTAP/TTAP Annual Conference – Pecha Kucha
July 23, 2013
1
out that particular answer. But a MOOC is a massive, open, online course.
You can reach thousands of people in one shot. It’s open to anybody, there
is no actual formal process to become administered to it, it’s online. That’s
the one thing people always wonder about. It is an online course that
reaches thousands of people.
It is a webinar? No. A lot of people have that fear that it is a webinar, but
the idea is that it’s so much more than a webinar. You can actually have
tests, quizzes, papers, online communities where people get together and
talk to each other all the time, so it does go be yond the webinar format. Who
puts them on? It started way back only three years ago with Oxford
University, Harvard, and Princeton. They put on several courses and there
are companies behind them like Corsara [phonetic] that has a lot of them.
We have the Ohio State University, Vanderbilt, and several others throughout
the world, and they’re starting to grow from not just universities, it is now
going on to others.
Well they present them because they want to get to a large, global audience,
but at the same time you can reach thousands of people with in a sense one
presentation that’s done it and you can actually provide credits for them to
some extent. If you’re concerned that people aren’t really learning, you can
provide quizzes to them, so that always helps. But why do people take
MOOCs? Well individuals want to learn more. It might be a subject that
they’re not overly comfortable with now, but they might have an interest with,
or they’re in a certain path of their life and they want to do somethi ng else
and they want to just explore it, so they have that ability. One of the biggest
advantages to it though is they are free for the vast majority of them, they are
free. So it gives them that ability that they can try out this particular subject,
is it something they like, and they don’t have to worry about did I just waste
tuition on something I have no real interest in overall. So it has that
additional advantage to that overall.
The original thought is people think aren’t these meant for young a dults?
That was the original concept that there are people that these were setup for
were high school students to get them interested in a university or a
particular program or further on with it, but that has changed. In just three
short years the reality has turned out that most people that do this are adult
learners. Approximately 70% are post -collegiate. They’re either trying to
further their career or get additional continuing education and that’s what
they have actually turned to because it works on their schedule being online
overall. It’s a set period of time where they have to take the course, but it is
that.
What are they like? This is one course I’d been taking. It is internet,
security, and history by Dr. Charles Severinsen at the University of Michigan,
also known as Dr. Chuck. He puts on this thing about, he’s been doing it for
LTAP/TTAP Clearinghouse
National LTAP/TTAP Annual Conference – Pecha Kucha
July 23, 2013
2
three years and I found out he’s actually one of the instigators or one of the
fathers of MOOCs. I only found that out the other day. He provides a lot of
insight on the history and he’s got a good program, though it does look like
the webinar format overall, he does get to scribble on it. You can barely see
that he wrote the word “magic” up there because he has that kind of good
engineer type handwriting or computer guy handwriting. It does have that
interactiveness. If you see this little yellow dot there, that’s actually where
there’s a quiz, so it goes along, but overall there’s actually weekly quizzes
that you have to take, you have to get a passing grade on them, you also
include peer reviewed papers that people can submit. With this particular
course, the first paper, 1,100 people submitted a peer-reviewed paper. He
provides videos on how to do it.
But one of the key parts of all of these MOOCs is t hat you’re expected to get
involved with group discussions. That’s based on the online forums. You
either ask questions, you answer questions, but you are supposed to
participate. In the case of this one particular class, the other 8,000
participants throughout the world. They do exist throughout the world. But
the concern about MOOCs, do people actually finish them? The real answer
are, because they are free, between 60-70% of the people who initially sign
up do not make it to the end. The vast majo rity of them don’t make it past the
first week. A lot of people are just there to see if they are interested in the
subject and they may find out that they are not.
The future is people are wondering what’s going to be out there? What is the
future of MOOCs overall? Well, a lot of people have different thoughts on it.
Some people think they can actually make giant overall programs, a Master’s
degree program and they can charge a formal tuition to it, other people think
it might just stay as a way to go for younger Americans or even go for the
continuing education crowd, but a lot of people do think ultimately it will do it.
There’s going to be a lot of changes in the next year or so, there are a lot of
universities that are clamoring to get involved, especially this fall. There’s
probably about 40 new universities on-board just for September. But the
concern is, some people think it’s a cash cow. Companies like Microsoft are
getting involved with it now. They think there’s a potential for a large amount
of money. The ultimate thing, the people have grown used to that freeness of
it and the openness of the course. So even though a lot of people are going
to try in the next few years, the general thought is that it won’t become such
a thing.
Is it the next big thing? It all depends. Is it going to be the cash cow that
some people think it is? Probably not. Can you reach a large group of adult
educate—people that are seeking adult education? Very likely. If we want to
get out the message to the entire country and the entire world, it’s a way
because ultimately in the end it has turned out to be a great way to reach
individuals to allow them to continue with their future education needs, their
LTAP/TTAP Clearinghouse
National LTAP/TTAP Annual Conference – Pecha Kucha
July 23, 2013
3
continuing education needs, and then individuals can be ultimately the
champions of their own educational program.
[applause]
MR. KEVIN MONAHAN: Good morning. My name is Kevin Monahan and I have
been working with NIH since 2005. I came on-board as an information
management specialist and process improvem ents. One of my first projects
when I came on-board with NIH was a break even analysis. What was
happening is, they were using most of their money for delivery when they
should have been using a lot of their money for development. We really had
to do a break even analysis and figure out how we’re going to recoop delivery
costs and be able to use the money that’s budgeted for NIH for actual
development.
While I was there, one of the things I learned about NIH is that they are
authorized by Congress in 1970 and that they are put there to educate, train,
and develop the current and future workforce transportation community. One
of the things that I also found out about NIH is this is how they were doing it.
They were using slide projectors and movies and anything else that was old
school that you could think of that wasn’t working very well. They really
needed to move forward. I don’t think they knew how to do it, so I promised
to take the next project, which was to help them develop a distance learning
program. All we did was focus on web-based training and web conference
training and we wanted to make sure that we could do that right. We went
and we looked at all the instructor led trainings and found the pieces that we
knew could work as a web-based training component or a web conference
training component and in just a few years we were able to develop quite a
list of distance learning products. We did this also with TCCC, so NIH and
TCCC working together to create several web -based trainings, web
conference trainings and other tools to get us into distance learning.
A few years ago I was sitting watching my son, this is him, playing on his
iPad and one of the most amazing things he did was go into “settings” and
change all the settings smaller for this little hand so that he could play. I
asked him how he did it and he said you just go to “settings” dad. I realized
that people are embracing technology a lot quicker than we, even at four. I
sat down with our program director and said we’ve got to embrace it, we’ve
got to leverage it, our old stuff and our new stuff. So we sat together, we
created several lists of projects that we wanted to do, but we knew that there
was going to be ups and downs, but we had to prepare our staff that some
things we’re going to do we’re going to do right, some things we’re going to
do we’re going to do wrong. The ones we do wrong we’ll take those as
lessons learned, the ones we do right we’ll take those lessons learned and do
them better.
LTAP/TTAP Clearinghouse
National LTAP/TTAP Annual Conference – Pecha Kucha
July 23, 2013
4
We’ve been working hard over the last several years to get involved. Getting
involved didn’t mean just creating a Facebook account. What getting
involved meant was truly getting involved. We helped becoming part of a 508
committee with FHWA, we’ve actually purchased iPads and se nd them around
the office and we all try to bust them and fix them and figure out ways to do
things right and wrong. The other thing we did was we improved our website.
We improved it so it’s easier to use, it’s easier to search. This is actually
looking at it on somebody’s iPhone to make sure that everybody could get a
hold of it no matter what device that they were using.
The next project was its first mobile app. But we wanted to make sure we did
a project that was going to be successful, so we di d the pavement
presentation checklist; small checklist that people were going to have to carry
around, 14 different little guides in their truck with them. We put them all at
the fingertips of a person right on their phone so that they could use them.
The next thing was a virtual bridge. We know that inspectors need to see
what a bridge looks like with defects. You don’t really want to put people —
drive around and show them the bad bridges. We created a gaming device
that actually bridges, two types of bridges and you create your avatar, you
pick your tools and you go around these bridges just like a game and you
look for defects on the bridge. This makes sure that we really teach
inspectors what these defects look like so that they can make good calls out
when they’re actually working.
We did a virtual expo. We know that travel was getting really tight, and this
was a period when it was really tight, so we did a virtual expo. We got 22
states virtually over to working with several partners on it, AVS C and it was
very successful.
The next thing was video conference training. This is an old tool, but we’re
really trying to embrace it again; again because of travel budgets and people
have limited time, so we’re really taking this program and taking it to the next
step. In addition to building or embracing technology and leveraging
technology we had to build partnerships and that’s what’s bringing me here
today to talk to you. We’ve worked with several groups, both internal and
external at NIH, but we have to make sure that we’re not just a partnership
that nothing’s happening. It has to be a partnership we’re actually making
some progress. We’re working with the resource center of federal lands, the
internal program offices at FHWA, this group here we’re actually meeting with
the states one-on-one and we’re actually going out to some of these
associations and talking to them and asking them what can we do better
working with you?
In our meeting today working with you guys what we know we got to do is
help get some qualified instructors. We know we’ve got to look at our list of
courses and prioritize which ones are most important for this community, the
LTAP/TTAP Clearinghouse
National LTAP/TTAP Annual Conference – Pecha Kucha
July 23, 2013
5
LTAP community. And we’ve also got to find ways to incorporate you into
helping us develop our trainings.
We have started doing that. We have several folks that are already attending
our instructor development courses. We’re looking at those folks that have
been approved to tell us what courses they want to teach, get it approved,
and allow them to do it, and also allow them to localize the materials with the
phots and the things you need.
[applause]
MR. DAVID ORR: We’re going to be talking about the future of training. We’re
going back to the future, so I want to start by going forward and then we ’re
going to go back. How do I mean by going back? Well the future is going to
be about STEM, science, technology, engineering, and math. Good thing I
wasn’t a New York fan it’d be METS, math, engineering, technology, and
science, think about that for a second. But we’re going to be focusing on
things we need to use practical, day-to-day activities. That focus on STEM is
going to be pushing more and more people into college, into training. Well
that’s a good thing I think. But that means we’re going to be reading on
things like this, Kindles, webs, we’ve already talked about apps, things like
that. I’ve got the entire “Wizard of OZ” on this little device. Read it on the
plane when they let me. We’re going to be using reading on the web, that’s a
great technology that we’re going to be using into the future. That’s good.
We’re going to be distance learning. I like distance learning, it’s a great way
to get people involved who can’t travel, but it has to be interactive. There’s
nothing worse than distance learning where you’re staring at a talking head
all day long, that’s really exciting isn’t it? Here, we got things on the screen
like Ted talked about, that’s going to be a great tool into the future with
distance learning if we use it because we can be self-paced. Some people
go slow, some people go fast. This is the good thing about the new
technology. We’re going to be able to go at our own speed. That self -paced
technology is going to be good for all of us into the future.
We’re going to be talking about MOOCs, I like MOOCs, I think they’re going
to be good because you can do one person to 1,000 to 10,000 people. I am
concerned a little bit about certification and how we’re going to pay for this in
the long run, but I think of MOOCs as the old royal academy where people
were stuffed into a wooden building to hear a scientist talk about fire. That’s
what they did, they watched - - with fire. We’re going to have new technology
on our phones, on our tablets. We’re going to have application s, we’re going
to be doing these things like Qualtrics and WebEx and Blackboard. The
iClickers that we use to get interactive stuff, they’re really cool. If you
haven’t used them yet you should start embracing them, they’re good
technologies. They’re going to help us day-to-day in our activities, in our
LTAP/TTAP Clearinghouse
National LTAP/TTAP Annual Conference – Pecha Kucha
July 23, 2013
6
training. We’re going to know whether we’ve taught people, we’re going to
have virtual training, here’s the local roads program staff getting ready for
our future, hopefully not. But we’re going to be d oing training. These are
simulators, they’re portable. Heavy equipment, make the mistakes here
rather than in the field where people get hurt. We’re going to be doing virtual
training on a day-to-day basis. This virtual training will make us safer. We ’re
going to flip our classes, which means we’re going to be doing lectures and
things ahead of time, assignments. How many of you would have like to
actually, this is supposed to be a video of rafting, for those of you who went
rafting, to actually know what you’re going to encounter before you hit the
water? Learn before the class so the class can be more interactive. That’s
going to be really valuable because training is hard. I hate it when people
say training is easy. Training is hard. It’s hard because you’ve got to put all
the new technologies. You got to think about how people learn. Adults learn
in different ways, children learn in different ways. You got to take advantage
of that because training is difficult.
Actually truth be told, I know I said I hate people saying this, but training is
easy. Training is easy when you get the right people who are passionate,
who want to take advantage of these new technologies, who want to learn,
who don’t want to forget, but we have to go back into th e future to think about
that.
We’ve been doing some of these trainings for a long time, but we always are
constantly striving to improve. Yes that’s me both on the left and on the
right. But we’re always trying to get better. There’s still going to b e a need
for traditional classes where people sit in lecture halls and listen to lectures,
but good instructors will still have that interactive nature to them, but the
traditional class isn’t going away any time soon because that’s how some
people learn best, and that’s okay. There’s still going to be a need for
hands-on training no matter how many simulators and virtual trainings we’ve
got, whether it’s bridges or equipment, we’re going to have to go out, we’re
going to have to learn on the job because we’re going to make mistakes.
Hopefully we’ve taught our people, but they’re still leaning on the job training .
And that on the job training is still going to be the most valuable for a lot of
our crews. We’ve got to think old school, but we’ve got to lo ok into the future
too.
This is what Popular Science said a computer was going to look like in 2004,
50 years earlier. I think they got it wrong. But they came close. They at
least thought in the future. We need to think about the future, but don’t
forget that old school stuff. It’s still useful; let people learn because it comes
back to one-on-one.
Of all the things we do at the program, I love the fact that we get out one -onone teaching people because you learn best when you can interact. We’re
LTAP/TTAP Clearinghouse
National LTAP/TTAP Annual Conference – Pecha Kucha
July 23, 2013
7
doing that here at this conference. Here at one of the EDC exchanges on
GRS bridges, the people building the bridge are talking to the people at the
class. They’re learning one-on-one. There needs to be interactive stuff. So
for instance, which way is the bus going to go? Which way? The answer is
it’s going to go to the who said left? You’re correct it’s going to the left,
kindergarteners get this right every time because there’s no door. Think
about it for a second.
We’re going to still have classrooms. Those classrooms might be this, you’re
in a classroom right now. It might be a standard class, it might be a lectern,
but we still need people in classes because no matter what we do we learn
half of what we learn talking with each other, so we stil l need classrooms.
And I hate to say it, we still need books. No matter what we think about the
paperless society we’re still going to have books. Yes, I’ve got books on
here, but sometimes you can actually find things faster in a book, especially
if you’re not quite sure what you’re looking for. So there will still be a need
for books. There’s still going to be a need into the future about the three R’s,
which by the way I’m not the world’s best speller, but three R’s, I got one R,
an A, and a W, but it’s still pretty important. In fact there’s actually research
recently that finds that even in STEM people who can read and write do
better in the future. They do better in the future. It really comes back in the
long run to a gentleman by the name of Robert Horgvist [phonetic], this
gentleman right here. He popularized the phrase called “the teachable
moment”. When people are ready to learn, that’s when they will learn.
And so as last night I learned a new phrase as the basket would say “let’s - “ or thank you.
[applause]
MR. BYRON BLUEHORSE: Good morning. I’m going to share with you a bit of my
experience, kind of my education and kind of how I got into this program.
When Renee asked about the future of training of this presentation I looked
at a lot of Pecha Kucha slides to get ready for this. When I was in the Marine
Corp I used to be a MOUT instructor, Military, Operations, and Urban Terrain.
What they were trying to do at that time was to predict where they were going
to be fighting in the future, house-to-house combat, a lot of what they did was
back in the strategic training that we did was in Vietnam. So they were trying
to figure out where are we going to fight in the future?
This next slide here shows where they’ve actually gone to virtual training. A
lot of the stuff you see now house-to-house they can kind of put that into a lot
of the younger soldiers without having to go out there at least kind of give
them that experience of what to expect.
Then when I got out of the Marine Corp I went to university and that’s where I
sat into these 300 lecture halls, it was very impersonal, trying to get by,
LTAP/TTAP Clearinghouse
National LTAP/TTAP Annual Conference – Pecha Kucha
July 23, 2013
8
trying to get to the professor and stuff like that, his attention. Math I think
was the biggest one where you had 300 people, so that was my learning
experience. Then there was an opportunity, an online course of the
University of New Mexico that was an anthropology course, and pretty much
it was just a syllabus, read the books, and turn in paperwork, there was no
interaction between the professor at that point. That was the early 2000
when I was there.
Now I’m on the other end. A lot of the training that we do we have to travel
out and this is one of our project management classes. We do a lot of plan
reading, a lot of—the experience we try to give them is plan reading, stuff
that they’ll actually have to use when dealing with the contractors and
consultants and stuff like that. We try to give them actual on the ground type
training. This is one of the classes that we do where we’re actually out there
and they’re doing inventory and they’re actually coding the roads and trying
to input that into a data system.
But not everyone can travel. Not everybody has the ability to just to waste
money. We’re at that point where we need t o figure out what to do, how to
reach people. A lot of what we’re hearing is yeah we really like this face -toface, but we really want some virtual online courses and until we have this
happen I think online is probably what we’re seeing right now. We’re not
going to be hooked up and quickly inserted with knowledge and hopefully we
never really get here. That’s the matrix.
Our university has actually kind of moved toward online courses. This is one
of the courses that was developed by our travel management program
manager in combination with a consortium, was an online course, self -paced
course where students can just log on, register, and pretty much pay a one
credit tuition and again, this has a lot of videos, a lot of interactives, a lot of
links. But what we found is it really didn’t work, so now we’re switching to
this same online course, but it’s instructor led now. I think the first time out it
was really, I think somebody had mentioned that a lot of people don’t finish
these courses, so this is what we’re switching to now.
I’m actually in the process of developing a course and one of the things I
recognized was that I didn’t know Word Press. That’s what our university is
using. Again, there’s a lot of word-type, word document type information that
you can put in there or videos and stuff like that. So when I came into this I
was like how do I learn this, how do I do this, who’s there? If we don’t have
the money at our university to do a lot of things with sending people out to
training, so I discovered lynda.com. Lynda.com has over hundreds and
hundreds of video in two, three-minute increments from learning how to run
your camera to auto-cad to project management. We actually paid a
subscription, but I actually just found out our univer sity has a subscription.
LTAP/TTAP Clearinghouse
National LTAP/TTAP Annual Conference – Pecha Kucha
July 23, 2013
9
With that, well how do you bring that technology and how do you do that in house? A lot of us don’t have the money to go out and hire folks. Well I’ve
noticed a lot of people move into the D 7,000 Canon type equipment to start
recording two to three-minute, five-minute videos. Then again that can be
put on to YouTube and Vimo, the slide here to the left is actually a nice little
five-minute narrative that the Alaska State DOT Department did on kind of a
snapshot of what it’s like to travel in Alaska. They’ve been pretty successful
of that. One of our members had to ask us to do something similar, so they
could go after grant money and that kind of gives a good snapshot of what it’s
like. In today’s world we had to have the ability to be cross-platformed, stuff
that works on iOS, Android, iPad, everything has to be available and not all of
us again have the coding.
Is it the key, online development? Again, I think that’s part of it, but we still
need that face-to-face instruction-type training. Again, I think the online
course is a way to reach more people. Our university has actually made
quite a significant change in our department. We actually had the e -learning
and distant education department now to help faculty setu p a lot of this
online, using your iPhone, using a flip phone, how do you develop courses.
We actually have an iTeach program where every summer this department
brings in faculty to teach you how to use technology, teach you how to do
certain things, how to use iBook. I just found this, Adobe Presenter. Adobe’s
jumping on-board, it’s about $500 for this, there’s no student or education
pricing I’ve found for this, but they’re actually doing that kind of webinar and
you can record the teacher kind of thing online. I think it is where we’re
going.
MIT has a Scratch program where there’s teachers, educators, parents,
students they can actually do some programming and do some online tools
and exercises, quizzes, and I think that’s kind of where we’re going. It’s a
combination. I think it’s going to be of the online and a continuation of face to-face and a lot of hands-on training. I think that’s where we’re at.
[applause]
MR. KEN SKORSETH: Well thank you and good morning everyone. I’m supposed
to be retired instead of up here for public ridicule. But I appreciate the extra
time, 20 slides, 20 seconds each, that’s more time than we get in an average
district commission meeting, so now I need to start it.
I’m going to talk to you about what I think you ’ll have to do in breaking some
tradition in some of your training and trying to help our local friends. Yeah
the bottom of the subtitle, I can’t even pronounce it, but I guess I’m doing
one. Seriously though I do want to present something that some of t he
people in my region have seen, but for some of the rest of you, and I know
this is nationwide. This is what you’re dealing with; thick, hot mix overlays
LTAP/TTAP Clearinghouse
National LTAP/TTAP Annual Conference – Pecha Kucha
July 23, 2013
10
are wonderful, eight to 10 inch concrete slabs are better yet if you can afford
them, we’ve only had one of those built in a local government in all of South
Dakota last year, that is concrete, and our overlays are diminishing. You’re
going to have to be able to present alternatives. I’ll just quickly look at three.
A good quality gravel, Grothaus you knew it would come, but it is an option.
But treated gravel, and then asphalt sealed surfaces, and I’ll explain a little
bit about what they are. They are indeed asphalt surfaces, but they are not
paved. High quality gravel; this one carries over 100 vehicles per day, it’s
part of a current study that we’re doing with our DOT. I’ve never seen one
perform better. As a matter of fact a lot of them with 15 vehicles a day don’t
perform that well. It’s simply getting a handle on quality gravel and it is a
great alternative. People don’t like it, I’ll be quick to admit that, they will
complain loudly, some of you have lived that, my county engineering friends,
but look at the lower right, which one would you really rather drive on? And
for a lot of us in the Central Great Plains that’s becoming a harsh reality.
Look at this, I’ve never seen an agent, this is outside of the U.S., but I’ve
never seen an agency go to greater lengths to hold a pavement together than
that one in the upper left. You can run a motor grater once a week over the
one on the lower right. Seriously, they are under 150 vehicles per day, our
current criteria says it should be gravel. However, lest you think every local
road should be upgraded to gravel in my terminology, I really do n’t see it that
way. Trust me, I’ll never forget this one, Johnson County, Wyoming up in the
oil and gas country, unbelievable. It wasn’t dark, it was just a gloomy day
and that’s how that road looked.
So you look at the next option, which is stabilized or treated gravel, whatever
term you want to use. Look at this one. That had no blade maintenance for
one year after construction. I’ll give you a few more facts about it, but just
take that in a moment. We call it poor man’s pavement. It’s treated w ith a
liquid magnesium chloride. There’s just that one little bit of the criteria, but
look at your traffic count. I’m sorry I didn’t realize this room would be so big.
If you can’t read it total traffic is well over 600, but more importantly it carries
over 100 trucks. If you do it right you can do that.
Here’s another one, I’ll comment briefly. We haven’t worked near as much
with this. It’s an oil byproduct. It’s a thin seal, it’s an organic oil. Mr. Greg
Vavra [phonetic] up here with me this year at the conference knows a whole
lot more about this than I do. You can talk to him. This slide is exactly one
week old. We have documented some long-term performance with that
product. In this case it did survive two years at a grain elevator, but on really
deep bays here where they don’t work. I could talk about a number of
stabilizers, but again I’m going to confine it just to that.
Then those asphalt surface seals; I’m not here to impress you with all the
places I’ve been. I am here to impress you with what a lot of nations,
LTAP/TTAP Clearinghouse
National LTAP/TTAP Annual Conference – Pecha Kucha
July 23, 2013
11
especially in the Southern Hemisphere are doing. State highway in Australia,
high volume, that’s a sealed surface, it is not paved. There’s a close -up look.
Some of the folks in my region have seen these, but the rest of you. Now
there’s base. That’s the key they build deep base, all the structural strength
to carry loads is in the base, the surface is nothing but a seal. Used on
primary roads down there.
This one’s in Australia. I saw the John Deere tractor and I got over my home
sickness. But again, that is a very high volume, that would be the equivalent
of a local two-lane state highway or in my state perhaps even some of the
lower volume federal two-lanes. It’s not paved.
This is yet another one in a different location, South Island of New Zealand,
you see the snow. They have frost in case you wondered, do they only
perform where you don’t have that. Again you don’t see it too often at this
high level, but they still use them and they can make them perfor m. Finally
our friend Simon Oladeli is here, so I put this in for his benefit. This is about
three months ago in Botswana. What impressed me about this one, it’s more
recently constructed, but it had absolutely zero maintenance for nine years.
It’s not paved. It’s nothing but a surface seal on deep base.
There’s a close-up of the site of it and you can see that’s the grand total of
the thickness there between my index finger and my thumb carrying about
500 vehicles a day, about 15% trucks. Their axe l weight limits are higher
than ours.
We’ve dabbled with it a little bit in my home state and it does work, but you
really have to change design philosophy. You have to change engineering.
You have to change construction approaches, you just have to c hange
thinking, but this one has been performing very well as of right now we’ve
watched it four years. This is the same road documented just about two
months ago. You’ve got to break tradition my friends. Study these
alternatives, it’s a way you can really help your local customers.
It is not easy I’ll emphasize that. It’s not easy. It is very rewarding. So I
thank you for all this extra time Renee.
[applause]
MR. JEFF ZAHAREWICZ: Good morning. This is going to be one of those “Federal
Highway reserves the right to…” moments here because I’m going to adapt
the Pecha Kucha model a little bit and do Pecha H aikucha for reasons and
demonstrations that’ll be evident in a second here. I’ve entitled my five, six
minutes of fame “advancing and enhancing f rom the federal perspective or
the program office perspective”.
Yes, when you see me this is what I’m typically talking about, so I’m quickly
LTAP/TTAP Clearinghouse
National LTAP/TTAP Annual Conference – Pecha Kucha
July 23, 2013
12
driving outside the city limits of Zaharewicz’s comfort zone here, but I do
want to emphasize innovation, ingenuity, invention, and imagination, themes
that we will talk about in these next few seconds and through the conference.
I am not a trainer, you know that. We’re here from the program office to see
and engage your needs, hear from you about tools and resourc es we can
continue to develop for you to help you advance your skills and enhance the
learning experiences of your clients and customers. So we are here to listen
to you and convert that forward.
I found haiku number one here and I thought it spoke to LT AP and TTAP
pretty nicely. Over 30 odd years the program has really advanced. It is in
this evolutionary stages yet again and if we as a program can embrace that
evolution and we in TPP and in the office of technical services can help you,
we will really make—continue great strides. We’ve talked a lot about
classroom learning and the instructor lead environment here, not a stoic, not
a stodgy, or as musty as these might demonstration, but let’s face it, some
among the world have said that the instructor led environment is going the
way of the dinosaur. David says no, I say no as well because if it did we
would lose opportunities like this and experience from the Connecticut LTAP
center where folks are gathering around a tabletop exercise. How can you
replace that energy by having four or five people convening over a common
problem in a space? But yes we do acknowledge that there are other ways to
engage with each other. The overwhelming sometimes pervasiveness of the
webinar, and/or web-based training, I have recognized the difference. I can
hear the guitar strumming as we wait to join in right now.
But think about it, we’re free of geography. We can reach an audience far
and wide, which is the good part. Is it fraught with challenges? Absolutely .
Look at this web conferencing conducted at the Spacely Spro ckets, never
mind the bellicose delivery of Mr. Spacely all right. Look at our adult learner
George Jetson, he’s about as disengaged as you can get. Have we as
participants been that disengaged? Probably yes. Have we provided training
that has disengaged our learners? Probably so.
If you hear me talk in other forums I talk often about two things, balance and
conveyance mechanisms. If we strike the right balance and figure out the
best conveyance mechanism for the technical topic we’re here to provide we
can have both these learning forums work side -by-side and really leverage
and support each other.
I’ll give you time to read a wise haiku here. Again, if there are tools that can
help you make better decision about which conveyance mechanism you’d like
to use, that’s what we’re here to learn about from you.
We’ve mentioned the instructor development class and about a year or so
ago in HITPP and the association forged our relationship . We’ve seen some
LTAP/TTAP Clearinghouse
National LTAP/TTAP Annual Conference – Pecha Kucha
July 23, 2013
13
progress, it is still a work in progress. We are going to pay forward and the
final products of this will yet to be fully realized. But I want to reemphasize
the fact that Tom Elliott has been your champion just as we have been your
champion and we see nothing but benefit and success from this initiative.
For us it’s really going to advance your skills as LTAP/TTAP community
trainers and we want that to be one of the important byproducts of this.
Mr. - - has given us this haiku, and I do want to remind folks that we do have
continued opportunities to convene LTAP/TTAP trainers in future instructor
development courses that we can host in Arlington. We’ll work with training
resources to continue to solicit folks to participate. I’m goi ng to give you my
two cents on mobile platforms. Mobile platforms really faces to acknowledge
two points; our transportation workforce is changing rapidly and many of our
clients have dashboards for desks right. Another ongoing request from the
NHI team and Tom Elliott, continued support for mobile applications; what do
you as a community think your locals are going to need? You see some
topics here, are there ones we’re missing? We want to get your information
and your feedback, number one on topics, n umber two on what sort of
functionality these applications would provide you. Think about the mobile
application arena, the classroom walls are gone, the classroom is open air,
the application of the learning is occurring right where it needs to be, out i n
the field, out where projects are being delivered, and activities are being
conducted. That’s an impressive advancement I think.
Think about the experience of the learner in a mobile arena, the tactile
experiences, the abilities to connect other medi a and have that at-hand while
at the same time having quick, easy access to job aids that are going to be
the technical information a local practitioner is going to need day -in, day-out
on the job, behind the dashboard and not the desk. Once we figure out the
best suite of applications, we take it on the road, the learning experience
goes even further and wider than it already has through the web -based
trainings, webinars, and support of the classroom experience.
So once again we’ll look for feedback and suggestions for applications that
you might think are valuable to use. We’ll work with the training resources
group as a primary pond to get that information from the LTAP and TTAP
community at large.
Maybe not as substantiative conversation here. I h ope I used my imagination
in effective ways here. I like this conveyance mechanism for information, it’s
good. See me for other comments and feedback and Mike Burk e is here
through the remainder of the week as well, we’re both very interested in
learning more about what your immediate needs are. Thanks.
[applause]
RENEE: I don’t know Jeff you’ve been holding back on us. You’re kind of funny.
LTAP/TTAP Clearinghouse
National LTAP/TTAP Annual Conference – Pecha Kucha
July 23, 2013
14
I’d like another round of applause for all of the speakers.
[applause]
LTAP/TTAP Clearinghouse
National LTAP/TTAP Annual Conference – Pecha Kucha
July 23, 2013
15