Social Media in the Workplace webinar

This looks like an interesting session on implementing social media in the workplace. Obviously there won’t be much detail, but for newbies its probably a good starting point. The link is to a Facebook page so I’m not sure whether you need to be a member of Facebook to register for the webinar.

Leveraging Social Media Tools to Improve Workplace Learning

Wednesday, 31 March 2010, 2:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (U.S. & Canada)

People are communicating, collaborating, and learning in new ways. Building communities powered by social media provides a way to blend formal and informal learning into an integrated method for overall performance improvement. However, social media is often misunderstood. Professional networking features and user-generated content/Web 2.0 features are easy to develop but bring additional challenges around how to make social media work. This session will explore how organizations can use social media tools to improve learning in the workplace. Attendees will learn:

• How social media has changed the way we communicate and collaborate
• How social media can support overall performance improvement
• Tips for building productive communities of practice

NOTE: Audio for this session will be provided using VoIP. You will require headphones or speakers connected to your computer to hear this presentation.

Freezing a laptop

This video suggests the fault lines that are rapidly developing in the real-time learning world over the use of technology in the classroom.  The person who posted this video states that it was not a functioning laptop and the incident was staged, presumably to make a point.

I can appreciate the instructor’s point-of-view. I teach a religious education class to sixth graders one night a week and I am constantly having to tell them to put away their smart phones as they text their friends that are not in class. On the other hand, I would have killed to have a laptop or a netbook to take notes with when I was in college.

The big question is whether outright banning of technology from the classroom to try and force students to pay attention to the lecture the route to go? I don’t think it is, but somehow students do need to learn the proper time, place, and decorum for using technology in the classroom. Who should be teaching this and when?

Huh?

I understand that you want to take precautions in the face of a winter storm, but I was left dumbfounded by this early closing announcement in my local newspaper. I thought the whole purpose of holding a webinar is for people to participate without leaving their home or office.

Source: The Day of New London

I’m not dead yet!

I’ve always liked this part of the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail, I use the line “I’m not dead yet!” whenever someone asks how I’m doing. But it also seems appropriate for the recurring discussion of the state of instructional design.

The latest discussion is cropping up on the University of Georgia’s Instructional Technology list service. It began with  a post by Bev Ferrell who points to a blog by Cathy Moore who uses Google Trends to start a discussion about whether instructional design is still valued. Since you need to subscribe to the list service to read it (which is free) I will copy and paste his post and some of the relevant responses here.

http://blog.cathy-moore.com/2009/06/no-time-for-design/#more-597<http://elearndev.blogspot.com/2006/07/learning-trends-isd-down-web20-upway.html>

No time for design? Quality? Does rapid design make ID irrelevant? ADDIE
dead?

Bev Ferrell
Moderator ITF

The posting she pointed to is more fascinating for the comments section, which Bev noted in an early response, than the original post. The comments turned into a B***h session for IDs. I highly recommend reading it. Bev’s initial post lay dormant for a day, but then resulted in a response from Rod Sims.

Interesting that this question should emerge again!

I can recall many years ago (1992 @ AECT) when we put "ISD on Trial" - I recall Dave Merrill as one of the participants ... and ISD was sentenced to 10 years Drill & Practice. All in good fun yes, but the questions were being asked nearly 20 years ago!

While 'instruction' is more commonly used in the US than many other parts of the world, the real questions for me relate to how we view learning, how we view performance and what are the best strategies to achieve learning or performance.

What can be argued is that the creation of formal courses, delivered by instructors and based on assumptions that students 'do not know' just miss the point. That is contrary to current philosophical and theoretical perspectives.

Similarly, the growth of networks (not just social) now provides the opportunity for learning from those networks - with 'experts' emerging as the knowledge-need arises. In this case we don't need ID, we just need an interest in 'learning'.

What I would argue is that we need different approaches and understanding of the world in which we live and thus different approaches to enabling learning - but the notion of rapid ID or other fads seems more about making a dead horse interesting rather than a serious attempt to make learning better.

Surely ID, traditionally, is about an empowered teacher and disempowered learner. If that's what you want, then ID is the answer. If not (which seems to align with current rhetoric) then we need something different - and why not? ID has been around for decades and surely approaches more aligned with today's world will achieve the environments we are looking for.

This then produced a posting by Timothy Spannaus who wrote:

Ah, yes, I remember it well. I was the defense attorney for ID, though I think it might have been at one of the last conventions of ADCIS - the late Association for Development of Computer-based Instructional Systems.

Another take on the long-running argument, Rod, is that,in spite of twenty years of efforts to kill ID, it's still here, still useful, still evolving. It was never about "an empowered teacher and disempowered learner."

For a really good discussion of the topic, see the edited book by Tobias and Duffy, Constructivist Instruction: Success or Failure? It gets beyond the typical constructivist/ID discussion and gets to the research and philosophy that drive the discussion.

Instructional design as a formal activity has only been around since World War II and in my mind is evolving. The ADDIE model is sound in its approach if applied wisely. The concept of rapid training design still applies ADDIE, but tries to only condense it to a smaller window. Informal learning is heralded as just-in-time learning, but I fear that corporations are latching on to it as another way to save money by eliminating formal instructional elements.

Bottom line: to paraphrase Mark Twain: The report of instructional design death is an exaggeration.

Curious Pages: Grammar Can Be Fun

The picture says it all:

 

Curious Pages: Grammar Can Be Fun

January Thiagi Gameletter

The first 2010 Thiagi Gameletter has been released by Sivasailam (Thiagi) Thiagaraja. For anyone unfamiliar with Thiagi, he is a long-time advocate of developing training that is both fun and to the point. The January edition contains a thought-provoking piece for any instructional designer labeled Ten Exciting Ways to Waste Your Training Dollars. In this piece Thiagi skewers conventional wisdom around analysis and planning, content, and delivery. For example, here is his take on multimedia.

5. Multimedia Spectacular

Conventional wisdom: Invest time and money in producing slick media materials. Participants are used to watching TV shows and animated computer graphics and reading five-color printed materials. They have high expectations for production quality. So use the latest technology and the most attractive layout for your training package.

Reality: As my friend Richard Clark points out, it is not the production quality but the instructional design quality that contributes to effective instruction. For example, a fancy television documentary may not result in more effective learning than an inexpensive handout. Also, most non-print media take a longer time to produce and much longer time to revise than paper and pencil approaches. And as my friend Ruth Clark points out, sophisticated graphics and animation may actually distract people from learning.

Recommendation: Use the least expensive and most portable medium for training. In most cases this turns out to be paper and pencil.

All 10 of his items serve as a sobering wake-up call to instructional designers everywhere. Other topics covered in his January newsletter are:

• An article about synthetic culture activities, which are a special type of simulation game.
• A positive psychology activity about five approaches to increasing your feelings of subjective well-being.
• An Guest Gamer interview with Scott Nicholson.
• A Textra game with the immodest objective of bringing about world peace.
• 99 words of advice from Brian Remer on how to ride out life's turmoils.
• Articles and activities by Brian about different aspects of breathing.
• Information about game design workshops in Zurich and Chicago.
• Tracy's single topic survey about new-year's resolutions.
• A report on last month's single topic survey.
• An invitation to our podcasts, hosted by Matthew Richter.

TGL: January 2010

Podcasters Beware.

I place this in the category, the closing of the internet. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is constantly battling to keep the internet open for all to use, has posted this statement about how they are now taking up arms to defend the rights for anyone who has a microphone, computer, and access to Internet to create and distribute podcasts. It seems a company named Volomedia has received a patent for exclusive rights to the process of podcasting.

The Volomedia patent covers "a method for providing episodic media." It's a ridiculously broad patent, covering something that many folks have been doing for many years. Worse, it could create a whole new layer of ongoing costs for podcasters and their listeners. Right now, just about anyone can create their own on-demand talk radio program, earning an audience on the strength of their ideas. But more costs and hassle means that podcasting could go the way of mainstream radio -- with only the big guys able to afford an audience. And we'd have a bogus patent to blame.

EFF Tackles Bogus Podcasting Patent - And We Need Your Help | Electronic Frontier Foundation