Help yourself to the elearning buffet

Interesting couple of articles published in the last few days about the future of elearning. On March 11th, the Rapid eLearning Blog wrote a piece called How to Create E-Learning Courses That Don't Waste Your Learner's Time.

In that piece Tom Kuhlmann writes that many learners are taking elearning courses "because they have to, not necessarily because they want to."

For them, it’s a matter of getting in and out quickly and then back to work.  This is not a commentary on the quality of the course or its content.  It’s just that many elearning courses are compulsory and the person taking it isn’t motivated by learning the content.

Those people only want to see the essential information, take the required quiz, and get on with their lives.  They don’t want to be held hostage by a course that has them clicking all over the place.  Tell them what they need to know and let them go.

He then proceeds to offer up a series of recommendations that include creating courses that are not courses and identifying course requests that would really serve a greater purpose as a reference work.

Then today I received an email newsletter from the training zone, a training association based in Great Britain. They published a an article titled: Help yourself to the elearning buffet (free registration is required to view).

This article contends that today's generation is accustomed to networked technology  and "lives its life on the web and has come to expect instant gratification...[they] are less accustomed to traditional methods of training, and prefer to be in control of when and where they consume information. The writer, Julian Dable, a regional manager for Travantis, thinks that, with an appropriate tweaking of how we perceive it, elearning is the solution to meeting the new web generation's needs for information solutions.

Elearning is a perfect balance between traditional learning and self-determined 'quick-fix' internet learning. Readily accessible, expert information from sanctioned subject matter experts is the safest and most practical way of getting information into your employees' hands. These days, widely available authoring software tools put power into the hands of subject matter experts who don't need to be technologically savvy to create training courses. They can integrate the power of multimedia audio and video to create engaging learning. Even better, such tools are easy to learn and the process can be contracted to a matter of hours or days rather than weeks.

His thoughts tend to gravitate toward moving elearning away from the traditional page turner and more towards a two-way communication structure where social frameworks can be built.

Help yourself to the elearning buffet - 19 Mar 2008

del.icio.us Tags: elearning,instructional design

Learning Visions: Accidental Learning

Cammy Bean has a great post about accidental learning. Cammy quotes from Yo-Yo Ma's presentation for NPR:

Every day I make an effort to go toward what I don't understand. This wandering leads to the accidental learning that continually shapes my life.

- Yo-Yo Ma

I've found that I often follow links (not just on the Internet) to discover new things. Just the other day I was listening to Jimmy Buffett's CD Don't Stop the Carnival. It was not a regular music CD, but it seemed to tell a story. So I searched Wikipedia to find out more about it and discovered it is based upon a Herman Wouk book by the same name. Buffett and Wouk colloborated on turning it into a musical

Normally I would not think about reading a Herman Wouk book because I am conditioned to think that he writes war stories (Thank you ABC which produced Winds of War and War and Rememberance mini-series.) The only war-related theme in Don't Stop the Carnival occurs at the beginning when it is described how the United States came into possession of the island during World War II.

After that it is the story of the adventures of Norman Paperman, a New York PR man who decides to slow down after he suffers a mild heart attack by running a resort in the Caribbean. I am now deeply engrossed in a book I would not have known even existed if I had not decided to find out the reasoning behind the unusual CD.

Learning Visions: Accidental Learning

The Blogosphere Mapped

Ever wonder about the size of the blogosphere? Are bloggers just talking to themselves? Matthew Hurst of Data Mining put together various maps of the blogosphere. This one shows the blogosphere as a social network. It appeared on Discover magazine's website in April 2007.

As expected the most populous site is the bold white spot marked with the number "1" and represents the political world.

The outlyers represent LiveJournal social networking sites (3), sports blogs (5), and pornography sites (6).

Other maps can be seen at Matt's blog, Data Mining: Mapping the Blogosphere.

del.icio.us Tags: web2.0,social networking,blogs

Recommended Books for Instructional Design

BOOKSTOREAD.COM has compiled a collected list of recommended books on instructional design and technology.

The purpose of the Top Ten Lists is to showcase the bookshelves of leaders in the field. Currently, we are accepting nominations for eminent scholars, theorists, and practitioners in instructional design and technology whom we would like to request that they submit a top ten list of their most influential or important books in the field.

The list is kind of dated (nothing new since 2002), but still a good starting point for individuals interested in pursuing an informal education in instructional design. Hat Tip to John Curry, Ph.D., at EffectiveDesign.Org, for including it amongst his links  this week.

del.icio.us Tags: instructional design,informal learning,learning

Social Media: Reducing friction and establishing a NEW discipline

A fascinating piece on the role of social media (blogs, wikis, twitter, etc.) in the corporate world. Key nugget:

Social media is not so much about direct influence of revenue, but more of a market optimizer - which DOES impact revenue. Current revenue streams AND future opportunities. Essentially social media aids in making markets more efficient with pervasive communication, connectivity and real-time transaction capabilities. Its a fundamental change in market mechanics.

Read it all.

spatially relevant » Blog Archive » Social Media: Reducing friction and establishing a NEW discipline

del.icio.us Tags: socialmedia,social networking

Of Typecasting and Individuality

 

Dear Mr. Vernon,
We accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was that we did wrong. What we did was wrong, but we think you're crazy to make us write an essay writing about who we think we are. What do you care? You see us as you want to see us—in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. You see us as a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal. Correct? That's the way we saw each other at 7:00 this morning. We were brainwashed.

From The Breakfast Club
a film by John Hughes

Back in January the weblog Cybernet displayed the image to the right as a Friday fun piece titled: Optical Illusion: Are You Right or Left Brained. The image originally appeared in the Sydney (Australia) Herald Sun in a short article about which side of the brain we rely on. The short article that accompanies the image states:

If clockwise, then you use more of the right side of the brain and vice versa.
Most of us would see the dancer turning anti-clockwise though you can try to focus and change the direction; see if you can do it.

According to this I am extremely right brain dominant as I could only rarely see her move in any other direction than clockwise. About the only time I could see her move in a counterclockwise motion is when I glanced at the image of the corner of my eye without thinking. But can this picture tell the whole story?

Can one picture determine whether you are left-brained or right-brained oriented, I'm not convinced and the more I thought of it the more it seemed to me to be a cute parlor trick and nothing more. As I write this, I'm watching the image out of the corner of my eye and I can see it moving counterclockwise, but as soon as I turn my full attention on it it switches back to going clockwise. I think this may suggest that when I am concentrating on writing my right brain kicks in to organize my thoughts. When my brain is at rest my right side takes over control. But it made me think about the impact on learning. And I did some cursory research.

While we like to see clean black/white solution for these issues, we live in a messy world and while there is extensive research into this phenomena, science is not ready to say that there is a hard and fast drawing of the line regarding brain lateralization.  

But this got me thinking about how we use categories and classifications to simplify our lives even in the realm of learning. There are still raging battles over how people learn.

• Is it sensory-related experience with no thought to internal motivation as the behaviorists believe?
• Should we be treated as biological computers that await to receive data  input by an expert on which we then act as the cognitivists support?
• Do we use data input to reach solutions on how to make sense of the world around us as the constructivists would have us believe?
• Or do we learn best by recognizing that learning operates much like a computer network in that data is received from a variety of sources in a variety of forms and we teach as much as we learn as the connectivists would have us believe?

The passion that arises over these discussions sometimes rise above mere academic debate and harken back to a more clannish response as we take sides in the discussion. Personally, I see some relevance in each. Only the individual who is learning knows what is going on inside his or her head (behaviorism), and if we have no knowledge of a subject then we are certainly filling a void with new data that is provided by an "expert" or someone who proclaims to be an expert (cognitivism).

As this new information is received and processed we usually work to fit it into our existing knowledge base, weighing it against previous information to determine if it augments what we already know or it replaces previous knowledge (constructivism).

Finally, there is no strict separation between learners and teachers - and there never has been. We learn from one another in an ongoing dialog that occurs on a daily basis in our schools, workplace, and our social life as long as we remain open to the idea that we can be taught by anyone (connectivism). And this is probably the biggest impediment we face today.

I am fond of saying to my children that the civilization we claim to see around us is but a thin veneer covering our continued preference for our prehistoric ancestor's clannishness. We find comfort in listening to people who hold similar views as ours; there is safety in numbers.

And every clan had an alpha male or female that the clan looked to for guidance. He or she was the leader and the survival of the clan depended on everyone following the alpha's directions. That is why education has adhered so closely to the sage-on-the-stage approach to teaching. For the clan to survive we must all learn to think as the clan thinks.

So, until we as individuals recognize that there is no one right way of thinking learning will remain stunted by our "simplest terms" and "most convenient definitions."

del.icio.us Tags: learning theories,learning,education,civilization

Technorati Tags: learning theories,education,learning,civilization

Next steps in Read-Write Web

I have to confess that I heard about the dataportability movement a couple months ago, but to be honest I can't really get my head around the concept. I would love to have someone explain this to me in terms I can understand.

The way I perceive it is that in the current environment each read-write web site we wish to participate in requires us to set up an account and generate a profile. The concept here seems to be that once you set up an account at one site you can then take that information to any other site without jumping through the hoops of generating a new profile.

This push seems to be going hand-in-hand with the OpenID concept. This would eliminate the need to actually set up individual user names and passwords for these various sites. I like this concept because it would eliminate the need to try and remember the login data for all my sites after I accidentally clean the cache of my browser. Again, here's a video that explains it well.

del.icio.us Tags: Web2.0,read-write_web

Meeting The Need for On-demand Learning - Webinar

Outstart is sponsoring a one-hour webinar by Chris Howard of Bersin & Associates on March 25, 2008 at 1:30 pm titled Meeting the Demand for "Learning On-Demand. The registration page describes the webinar as follows:

As companies move from course-centric learning to learning on-demand, the role of the corporate training department must change. This presentation will discuss the organizational changes, tools, best-practice processes, and resources required to support an on-demand model. Chris Howard of Bersin & Associates will further discuss how to leverage existing content and the types of standards and templates that work best.
Discussion includes:

• Learning for the new workforce: differences in learning and approaches between traditionalists, Boomers, GenX, and Millenials
• What will go away and why
• What's becoming hot & why you should care

Registered attendees will receive Bersin’s Integrating Learning Into the Enterprise Portal Research Paper, compliments of OutStart.

The myth of Web 2.0 democracy

I think that those of us who are supporters and promoters of Web 2.0 tools--such as wikis, blogs (.pdf), and social bookmarking--have known in the back of our mind that there is always a small cadre of people who do most of the work on these sites. Everyone else just kind of look on and occasionally tweak something posted by someone else.  Here's how Chris Wilson of Slate Magazine put it in his online article, Digg, Wikipedia, and the myth of Web 2.0 democracy describes it.

Social-media sites like Wikipedia and Digg are celebrated as shining examples of Web democracy, places built by millions of Web users who all act as writers, editors, and voters. In reality, a small number of people are running the show. According to researchers in Palo Alto, 1 percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site's edits. The site also deploys bots--supervised by a special caste of devoted users--that help standardize format, prevent vandalism, and root out folks who flood the site with obscenities. This is not the wisdom of the crowd. This is the wisdom of the chaperones.

His source is Ed Chi, a research scientist at Palo Alto Research Center's (PARC) User Interface Research Group. In a 2006 paper, titled Power of the Few vs. Wisdom of the Crowd: Wikipedia and the Rise of the Bourgeoisie, Chi, along with Aniket Kittur and Todd Mytkowicz analyzed the content creation and editing of Wikipedia. In a follow-up evaluation of the data, Chi noted on the PARC blog that there appeared to be at any given moment in time, a few user are a lot more active than the rest of the population, but there is a long tail of other users who are contributing to the effort.

When we are out selling these concepts to our clients we need to be sure to impress upon them that there is going to have to be a solid cadre of individuals within their workplace that will take the lead in populating and editing these tools. Management cannot expect all workers to flock to the site and enter data.

It is more likely that they will take a look at what a few people add to the database of information. If the content is easily accessible and is presented in a readable user-friendly format they may review it and modify it slightly. If hash is presented -- poorly structured wikis, social bookmarks that have no coherent folksonomy -- then the masses will probably ignore the content and continue to rely on other sources of information within the workplace.

A River Runs Through It

For almost an hour today I sat as my workgroup discussed m-learning and read-write web tools and my brain flashed back to a thought I had about a week ago. A week ago I had one of those moments where my mind wanted to pursue about five different avenues of exploration all at once. As I fretted over which avenue to pursue first, it hit me that there was no way I could pursue all of my choices at once and I need to prioritize.

Initially I was depressed because all of these projects:

converting home video to DVD creating a vodcast about the value of using Windows Live Meeting reading the book Gut Feelings maintain my blogging at reading other blogs

 

These were all things I wanted to do. But with work and family responsibilities that need to be managed, as well as a need for some downtime other than when I sleep, there was no way that I could manage it all. Besides vodcasting, I am interested in the entire broad spectrum of read-write web elements. But the sheer breadth of that topic and the virtual whip-lash I experienced as we bounced back and forth once again led me to dispair my lack of time to delve into it all.

That was until I followed Stephen Downe's post, A Guide for the Overwhelmed, Part 2 - It's a River, Not a Reservoir, to Rob Wall's post of the same name. Rob's post made me feel better. Especially this nugget:

The number and diversity of applications are increasing far faster than I am able to learn about them, let alone mastering them. But that’s not a problem. I can go to the river and get what I need. I’ve developed a trusted network of people who know about these sorts of things, and if I ask them to share their expertise they do so cheerfully. The currency exchanged in this case is not money but a willingness on my part to contribute back to those who ask within my areas of expertise or experience.

This is going to be my new motto. The flow of information can be daunting if you try to swim or walk against it. I need to let it flow around me, select one or two items I want to pursue and just kind of dip in and sample as I need to for everything else.

Is Instructional Design Theory Knowledge Necessary?

There is an interesting discussion going in the blogosphere regarding whether a instructional designer needs to be able to wax eloquent over the various instructional design theories, to perform as an instructional designer.

Start with this post, Theory vs. Application in Instructional Design: One Academic's View by Cammy Bean. Her take is that it may be necessary, but not necessarily by paying to earn a graduate degree in Instructional Technology. She references online discussions she has been having with Dr. John Curry, who teaches Instructional Technology at Oklahoma State University. Dr. Curry posted his thoughts, which were very similar to Cammy's in his blog post: Instructional Design in Academia — Where Theory and Practice RARELY Meet.

He cites a paper developed by Dr. David Merrill —  First Principles of Instruction — that seems to brush aside the idea that we need to understand in detail all of the theories such as the Dick and Carey Model or the ADDIE Model (hat tip to Stephen Downes for providing the links so I didn't have to look them up). Instead Dr. Merrill proposes that after reviewing the various ID theories and models it all boils down to knowing five basic principles.

To be included in this list the principle had to be included in most of the instructional design theories that the author reviewed. The principle had to promote more effective, efficient or engaging learning. The principle had to be supported by research. The principle had to be general so that it applies to any delivery system or any instructional architecture (Clark 2003). Instructional architecture refers to the instructional approach including direct methods, tutorial methods, experiential methods and exploratory methods. The principles had to be design oriented, that is they are principles about instruction that have direct relevance for how the instruction is designed to promote learning activities rather than activities that learners may use on their own while learning.

From this effort five principles are identified. These are summarized as follows:

• Learning is promoted when learners observe a demonstration, the demonstration principle.
• Learning is promoted when learners apply the new knowledge, the application principle.
• Learning is promoted when learners engage in a task-centered instructional strategy, the task-centered principle.
• Learning is promoted when learners activate prior knowledge or experience, the activation principle.
• Learning is promoted when learners integrate their new knowledge into their everyday world, the integration principle.

But returning to Bean's and Johnson's posts, if you read the comments the consensus seems to be we need to be at least cogent of the theories in order to sell ourselves and our capabilities to our clients. This is necessary, if for no other reason, then to put them at ease that we know what we are doing. As one commenter on Cammy's blog put it: "People respond to jargon. And, interestingly, people love learning other people's jargon...Citing academic theory makes it sound like you are putting more effort into it than 'I dunno - this just made sense. Whadya think?"

The discussion made me realize that I may have forgotten a lot of the terminology because I have not used it as often as I should. So I guess I'm going to place this on my list of items to do: Read up on all the basic theories to get them back in the front of my brain.

UPDATE: Cammy Beans in the comments section of this post asked what I consider the "basic theories" of instructional design. I'm not sure I can respond to that one. I guess the best I can propose is the ADDIE model without the "E", and if its elearning I am developing then the "I" isn't relevant either.

I prefer to think along the lines of how people best learn. David Pollard best summed that up in his post A Theory of Knowledge, and How it Could Save the World. People seem to learn best when:

1. They can directly use the skills you are trying to offer them followed by,
2. Directly observing the skill being performed by others, and finally
3. Hearing the skill being described by others.

I try to use these guideposts as my touchstone in designing instruction. My preferred goal is the first level of learning described by Pollard. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately in the case of some compliance training) direct use of skills is not always possible so I shoot for level 2 and try to at least demonstrate the skills and provide the learner with an opportunity to analyze and evaluate situations where these skills could be applied.

To that end, in answer to her question what is on your essential reading list?, my top recommendation is A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, edited by Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl. This book is a great source of assistance and inspiration when it comes to developing assessments, especially when I'm limited to multiple choice type questions.

Ah hah! Moment for a Monday Morning

I have to confess I'm feeling a bit guilty because I'm at work and I'm reviewing my learning blogs, but for this 50-year-old instructional designer, I could not resist posting this ah hah! moment I just had.

I was reading Jay Cross's article in Chief Learning Officer magazine about Adaptation. The gist of the article is that we are at a point in time where the workforce is split between those who came of age during a period that still was dominated by the Industrial Revolution and its vertical hierarchy and younger workers who are identifying with the information age and are more accustomed to its more horizontal hierarchy.

But my personal light bulb went off when I got to near the end of Jay's piece in which he wrote:

This is not to say that networks will replace all hierarchies, for that leads to chaos. Someone has to sign the paychecks and mediate among the stakeholders. The challenge is to achieve the right balance, applying command-and-control as appropriate for stability and networks when they improve performance.

Traditional learning is bursting at the seams because there is always more to learn and unlearn. The amount of knowledge in the world doubles every three years. New discoveries invalidate former truths.

So shoot me for being dense, but it never occurred to me to think of learning as something other than linear. You pass through your toddler years learning from your parents, siblings, and other toddlers; you enter elementary school, proceed through middle school, high school, college, etc.

I always saw this as just adding layers of knowledge, I never considered that New discoveries invalidate former truths, meaning you had to cycle back to information you formerly acquired and overwrite it with new information, or perhaps retain the old information, but store it elsewhere as invalid or obsolete knowledge that can be used as a red flag to correct others who still labor under the misleading or obsolete information.

Okay, back to work.

Let me tell you about...Excuse me, what were you saying?

Killian & Company have a fascinating opinion piece about the public's attention span and what it means to marketers which I think can also hold true for training and development individual. The article, The Post-Literate Era: Planning Around Short Attention Spans, when viewed in the perspective of learning initiatives would seem to argue against the lengthy (read 60 minutes or more) elearning initiative.

Brand holders need to be aware of the implications of this phenomenon, including such practical applications as starting a White Paper with a paragraph that consists of one short simple declarative sentence. Welcome to the Post-Literate Era – a period which began decades ago but which has gained momentum in the 21st century. The evidence is everywhere: we can even draw the graph of sustained attention, from a 19th-century reader willing to read David Copperfield over several weeks, to long-copy magazine ads of our grandparents' generation, to today's web pages that are given 4.5 seconds to show themselves relevant.

As an avid reader my initial response is to rail against this apparent turn of events, but, being a reader, I continued on from the initial proposition and found some guidance, guidance that had been fermenting in my brain already.

In today's age learning content can no longer be just facts on a page. They must be engaging which requires strong storytelling. Now this is nothing new and I've heard it said before the advent of shorter attention spans that successful learning events need to engage the learner, but I think this concept has often been given lip service while the focus of most learning is on how to save dollars by using software that will allow rapid development of e-learning courseware by the subject matter experts who know their materials. Unfortunately the subject matter expert may not be the best story teller.

Nobility, elected officials, and celebrities know that while they may be good at what they do, they may not be the best at telling their own stories. So they hire writers to tell their stories for them. Likewise the training industry sprang up to tell the stories of subject matter experts. I think as an industry we need to reflect on how we tell these stories and remodel them to reflect how society wants to absorb these stories.

Hour-long clicking of Next buttons to read course content and maybe see an animation or two will no longer work. We have to streamline presentations to be absorbed in smaller chunks and can be developed and delivered in multiple means: on-line courseware chunked into small (10 screens and no more) sections that can stand on their own; audio podcasts using narration developed for the courseware; transcripts of the podcasts for reading; online forums in which people can discuss the matter with one another.

It's a new age and we need to start thinking in terms of how our customers want to consume our product rather than force customers to try and swallow what we produce.

Fiber Optic Cable Cuts Isolate Millions From Internet, Future Cuts Likely | Threat Level from Wired.com

So there was a major Internet outage yesterday. We often worry about  electrical outage, but as we rapidly take to using our wireless devices as web access vehicles you have to wonder if we need to start worrying about network outages when we think about expanded use of e-learning and m-learning.

Given the desire by telecoms and broadband customers to keep costs low, situations like the current cuts will continue to happen, according to Todd Underwood, a Vice President at Renesys, which provides internet information analysis to the majority of the world's largest telecoms.

"Part of the lesson here is that there will always be outages," Underwood said. "This is all about money -- how much money do we want to pay to make sure the network doesn't go down? We are used to thinking of the internet as being a thing that goes down."

We take a great deal of our technology for granted until we lose it. Maybe we need to start thinking about redundancies in the training world as well.

Fiber Optic Cable Cuts Isolate Millions From Internet, Future Cuts Likely | Threat Level from Wired.com

-------------

Further thoughts: Is this occurring at the same time that the economy is tightening up and corporations will be looking towards cyber alternatives to traditional classroom training? Could we be seeing a perfect storm for the training world brewing?

Skunk works, ahhh, the smell of success

Jay Cross posted an interesting and quck video interview he did with Nigel Paine about what learning and development folks can look forward to in the near future as the economy seems to be stumbling. The interview occurred at the beginning of Learning Technologies 2008 in London, England.

I like the idea of running skunk work operations, in fact where I work we have been doing this right along. The big question is, after we flesh out these efforts, how do we take our skunk work products and convince the corporate IT departments to take the leap? That is an informal learning effort that has to be undertaken along with the formal proposal process.

As these tools  (wikis, blogs, social noteworks) become more familiar to the decision makers it should become easier to integrate them into the corporate workplace.

Reasons for podcasting

I was recently cleaning out my inbox when I came across the Jan. 16, 2008 edition of Campus Technology's Smart Classroom newsletter and the lead item was an interview with Rice University's Jeffrey Daniel Frey about podcasting and education. Mr. Frey offers some sound advice for individuals who are looking to get into the podcasting.

Two of his observations jumped out at me.

Campus Technology: Let's start by talking generally about podcasting in education. You've done a lot with podcasting, and you write and speak and consult on the topic. What do you see happening out there?

Jeffrey Daniel Frey: One of main thrusts is people who say that they need to podcast, but why? Doing something for the sake of technology doesn't work. The first thing I look at is the "why?" I ask people, what's the benefit? What are the metrics out there? What are you trying to say?

This is definitely an important question to be asked, not only for podcasting, but also for the use of any communications tool. Too often people want to jump onto the latest fad especially in the learning world.

His other comment is also something that gets lost in the rush towards the latest trend in content delivery.

CT: So it goes back to one of the basic rules about Web sites: it's really about content, not the medium.

JDF: Yes, know your audience, and start with the content. That's what we tell people when we're building a web site for them. Once we know that, we can figure out what the architecture should be around the content, then we can figure out what the delivery method for that content is.

Food for thought during this lunch hour posting.

Some would have us think we are all mentally ill...

It has been observed recently that the list of mental illnesses cataloged by the American Psychiatric Association has been increasing in step with the number of new pharmaceuticals that have been coming on the market.  But now here comes the claim that we are becoming addicted to technology.

Reuter's New Service posted a report Wednesday, Jan. 23,  quoting John O'Neill, the director of addictions services at the Menninger Clinic in Houston, that the public's use of cell phones and email is approaching "addiction-like behavior."

"We can become overloaded by technology and suffer consequences in our relationships," [O'Neill] added.

O'Neill's observations are backed up by psychologists who have classified technology addiction as an impulse disorder that can be as socially damaging as alcoholism, gambling and drug addiction.

The Internet/Computer Addiction Services in Redmond, Washington, which runs treatment programs and provides therapy, estimate that 6 to 10 percent of the approximately 189 million Internet users in the United States have a dependency on technology.

O'Neill said it's all about teaching people how to manage their behavior in a healthy way.

O'Neill claims that warning signs of  "an unhealthy relationship with technology" are:

• using text messages, email and voice mail (presumably the writer meant telephone) rather than face-to-face interaction
• limiting time with friends and family to tend to email, return telephone calls or surf the internet
• An inability to leave home without a cellphone

Anyone who reads my blog (and I thank all two of you, especially you mom!) knows that I have a love/hate relationship with technology in learning, but even I see a high-priced cure looking for a problem.

First off I think O'Neill is demonstrating his lack of understanding of technology by using the  term to define only electronic communications devices. Technology is broadly defined as the usage and knowledge of tools and crafts [by a speceies] to control and adapt to its environment.   Our automobiles that we use to get around are technology, as are the appliances in our kitchen that we use to store and prepare our meals, and the televisions, radios and books we read to keep us entertained when we are not driving or eating, or using communication devices.

We depend on all of this technology to survive. According to O'Neill we must all be heavily overloaded causing a ripple effect through our relationships. I think Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds gets it right when he says: I think that yammering on about addictions is the habit that some people need to kick...

Eye-openers from eLearning Guild's Authoring & Development Tools Webinar

I'm sitting in listening to the e-Learning Guild's 360 report on authoring and development tools and I was surprised at the top three tools their survey uncovered. The order is:

1. Adobe Captivate - 66%
   
2. Microsoft PowerPoint - 58%
   
3. Microsoft Word - 47%

I guess I am either niave or blinded by the fact that people use some very basic tools for elearning development.

More surprising was the typical way teams train on authoring tools.

• 81 % reported teaching themsleves
  
• 70% learn from peers
  
• 34% learn from formal external training

December 2007 Issue :: Global Learning Resources

Jay Cross has a fascinating take on corporate learning that is closely in tuned with where my thoughts have been going regarding the corporate learning world. Of course, Jay, being the master and I the poor grasshopper (apologies to Kung Fu fans everywhere), has distilled the essence of my thoughts much better than I could hope in an article titled Don't Call them Trainees in an article posted in the Dec. 2007 issue of Human Capital & Corporate Universities Newsletter. Money quote:

Instead of training, tell the worker what she needs to know how to accomplish the job. Offer a variety of ways to get up to speed, from treasure hunts to finding information on the company intranet. This makes the learner take responsibility. There's no longer an excuse for not learning.

He then proceeds to tell the story of Hans Monderman, a Dutch traffic engineer who argues that the a big problem with motorists and the way they drive are the number of street signs telling them what to do. Monderman has discovered that if you remove street signs, especially speed limit signs, drivers take more responsibility for their actions. In communities in The Netherlands where Monderman practices his craft, traffic accidents are down 30% and the average motorist's speed has dropped to 50% of what it had been originally.

Monderman says that if you treat people like fools, they act like fools. Take off the training wheels; they drive like grownups.

Being told to take a training course is like driving on a road with signs, stripes, and bumps. If a worker takes a training course but doesn't learn, what's her reaction? "The training wasn't any good."

Given the way people drive here in the northeast, I'm a bit hesitant to do away with street signs right away, but I do think we are overly paternal/maternal in the way we approach providing the knowledge adults need to know to do their jobs.

December 2007 Issue :: Global Learning Resources

Copyright Wars

Canada seems to be fighting back against the government-sponsored, corporate-driven copyright digital copyright rules that already exist in the United States. This short video explains the issue to Canadians in a brilliant 5-minute mash-up of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol and a compilation of science fiction movie and television standards by Galacticast.



As the recording industry sinks deeper and deeper into the DMCA quaqmire by now claiming that U.S. citizens cannot rip CD content onto your computer from legally purchased CDs, it seems clear that the downside of being an information economy is the push to lay legal claim to all sorts of information for the purpose of exacting a price for the use of that information. From a learning perspective this scares me to the bones.

Despite the best claims of businesses that their subject matter experts have all of the data necessary to develop the training they are buying, as an instructional designer who is often required to fast-track training development in the name of rapid instructional design, I and others like me often turn to the Internet to fill in gaps because the SME is not available and time constraints require us to produce content.

As information becomes more proprietary we run into another time hurdle in which we have to survey the site to determine if the information posted there is available for public consumption or is proprietary.

Electronic flash cards - wave of the future?

So I had a coworker send me a link to the video about the use of mobile phones for learning about a week ago. The first time I watched this something about it did not sit right with me. Take a look and see what you think.

I just re-watched it and it became more apparent what disturbed me. While the UCF Report attempts to position the use of testing via cellphones as something new and exciting it appears to me to be the same old "drill and kill" approach that traditionalists have been demanding a return to for years now; it's just dressed up in new clothing. Replace the cellphone with flash cards and you have the same approach to learning.

I guess the argument could be made that the cellphone approach makes it more appealing to the children and it engages them outside the classroom, but it bothers me that the cellphone delivery is also used during the class. Where is the teacher in all this? Primary engagement in the classroom should be between the teacher and his or her students? If the students are staring at their cellphone screen how does the teacher know they are engaged in learning and not IM'ing a friend?

While I think mobile learning via cellphones, PDAs, and other mobile devices have great possibilities, I'm a little leery about the approach put forward in this video. I think it is directing mobile learning initiatives down the same old path that education has traveled already. And if we have learned anything from the push towards learning on computers, once we start down that path it is extremely difficult to reverse course.

Another thing that bothers me about the UCF approach is the extension of the corporate concept that employees should be available 24-7 thanks to computers, cellphones, and blackberries to children and formal education. Parents already complain about their children being overburdened with homework and now they are going to receive more homework by way of cellphones? And their responses must be in by 6 p.m., not the next school day. This is a bit disconcerting.

Don't get me wrong I believe strongly that learning never stops, especially not once you walk out through the doors of the schoolhouse. But learning outside the schoolhouse is informal learning. It should not be about answering a cellphone and responding within a time frame dictated by a teacher.

Could this be the future of mobile learning?

After spending the past two days attending the eLearning Guild's mobile learning forums and listening to people wonder about the future of smart phone usage I came across this gadget this morning.

This is the Sony VAIO VGN-UX490N/C 4.5" Notebook PC. It is a personal computer packaged with Microsoft Vista Business edition, 1GB of RAM and a 48GB of Flash hard drive space. It offers both wifi and ethernet connectivity as well as bluetooth connectivity. It's price tag is only $2,400. This would be a great little package for mobile learning.

Future of mobile learning

The closing session of the eLearning Guild's Strategies and Techniques for Implementing Mobile Learning session was presented by Brent Schlenker, a research and emerging technologies evangelist for the eLearning Guild. His topic was the Trends and the Future of m-Learning. Rather than focusing on individual elements of mobile learning Brent looked at the bigger picture and had the participants thinking about the implications of information transfer to mobile devices.

Hinging his talk on the appreciation that technology does not stand still, Brent noted that "yesterday" technology (i.e. the internet) was about consuming – the read-only internet. Today we can interact with our cellphones by sending messages, sending images and video, etc. In the future a server will send information that it thinks we need.

This last concept is one that was touched upon in one of yesterday's sessions, a new "push" learning concept. I suppose the one area that scared me came from the chat pod where people were suggesting a workaround to the small screen in most mobile devices would be projection technology. The question is will businesses want their people to project their information in public? Does that then defeat the purpose of mobile technology? do we want to risk projecting the wrong kind of information in public? Do we want to be inflicted with other peoples videos? Its bad enough that we have to listen to their cellphone conversations.

Selling the Value of Mobile Learning

The second session of today's e-Learning Guild's Strategies and Techniques for Implementing Mobile Learning today was titled Selling the Value of Mobile Learning presented by Joshua Byrne of Adayana. The main message that Joshua delivered was twofold: 1) make sure that the learning opportunity you are proposing to address with mobile learning is an appropriate venue for mobile learning, and 2) It's easier to implement if you are only creating for a consistent (which I take to mean a single) platform.

He talked more about the shortcomings of m-learning, such as:

• the difficulty of deploying to multiple platforms because of their inconsistency in how they render the end product
• need to keep visual elements to a minimum and time to interact with the learning short because of the difficulty of staring at the small smart phone screen for a long time.

The key to selling m-learning is to identify the "killer app" that will make learners migrate to using mobile learning. He defined killer app as that element of a technology that people will adopt because of its convenience. Examples he offered included spreadsheets within the desktop computer environment and the ability to make phone calls anywhere drove people to quickly adopting cell phones.

And when you recognize that killer app you have to be sure it solves an important problem; and then you explain the solution using an anecdote that will make it understood. He also recommended having a proof of concept so that the person you selling the idea to can actually try it. Not only does this demonstrate the usability of the m-learning tool, but it allows the customer to see the hardware that would deliver the learning in action.

Day 2 of eLearning Guild's m-learning forum

I started the second day of the eLearning Guild's Strategies and Techniques for Implementing Mobile Learning forum by sitting in on the Anita Rosen's of ReadyGo, Inc., session on "Effective Mobiel Learning User Interface Design" and it was an intriguing cold shower in the warm glow of mobile learning juggernaut. Anita put it in perspective by noting that m-learning is the "bleeding edge" of learning. She noted that her success story revolved around her customer "Telefónica" which is a telephone provider and so they had the technology in place.

She cautioned that you really have to be sure of what you want to do and what your goals are because there are a number of limitations that must be overcome especially if you want to send your learning engagement out to a range of smart phones. Limitations include:

• Different operating systems support different levels of html and streaming animation
• Consider the environment that the learner will be taking the course it will be probably in a public area where there are distractions. Will the learner be able to stay focused

What she said works best is limited graphics and the graphics you do use should not have any embedded text because it will not be possible to read it. She cautioned against embedding too much audio or animations because of download speeds which she argued was around 19kbps. I found that a bit dubious and googled smartphone data transfer speeds and discovered that newer smartphone networks now boast of data transfer speeds equal to low-cost DSL connections.

Session 3: Learning at large: Mobile e-Learning Design

The final session for the day: Learning at Large: Mobile e-Learning Design presented by Clark Quinn. Clark was encouraging us to think outside the traditional learning paradigm and think about m-learning as performance support.

Things that he said that struck me as important:

M-learning is all about Learner's rights

• The right information
• to the right person
• at the right time
• in the right place
• in the right way
• on the right device

This was not original Clark Quinn, he was quoting Wayne Hodgins. He did offer some good advice when approaching m-learning beginning with "It's not about learning" it's about performance improvement; it should be brief and delivered in incremental amounts not a brain dump.

He also offered a new view of "push vs. pull" in that push is an intelligent learning engine supplying just-in-time information pro-actively to a learner in the field. He offered the example of a sales person who would automatically receive information on his cell phone or blackberry concerning the client he or she is visiting and the services they may already be buying or may be interested in buying.

Session 2: Investigating and Proposing Mobile Learning

So for the second session Investigating and Proposing Mobile Learning was ok, I guess you always have a little let down after the first session. The presenters – Andy Petroski and Sandy Hack from Highmark – were handicapped early on by audio problems. There presentation focused on their efforts to introduce m-learning capabilities into their company.

They seemed to be approaching m-learning from a traditional training view in which you have to make the learning interactive. As I noted in my posting after the first session, my observation is that if learning content is less than 10 minutes (and granted that is an arbitrary number not based on any research that I know of) it can be a passive presentation.

That said they provided a great laundry list of areas ripe for m-learning:

• Current company or product announcements (video, audio, or email)
• Product and inventory updates
• Just-in-time training or practice
• Any location-based and contextual learning
• Text-based (or simple animation) simulations and games
• Social learning
• Spaced practice
• Coaching or mentoring
• Case studies
• Job aids
• Audio or video
• Decision Support
• Tests and quizzes
• Charts and graphs

They used the phrase mobile learning library as a name for the repository for their m-learning content. It's a catchy name, that could catch on, although I think most content will end up residing in a LCMS so that it is accessible by both portable devices and computers.

They did note that challenges of initiating an m-learning initiative, starting with security. How do you deliver proprietary information to mobile devices in the field? If devices are distributed to employees preloaded with content how do you ensure they are not lost or stolen? While this is a problem with laptop computers as well as mobile devices, mobile devices being smaller can be more easily forgotten.

The other key issue is usability. Not everyone has great vision and the tiny screens on some multimedia cell phones could be a problem for people to view streaming video or text content. The duo did not have all the answers, but what they offered us was rough map of the terrain that the rest of us can use to explore m-learning in our environment.

eLearning Guild's Mobile Learning Forum

We just finished the opening session of the eLearning Guild's Strategies and Techniques for Implementing Mobile Learning forum and I wanted to record my thoughts before I enter session 2. The first presenter was David Metcalf from the University of Central Florida.

Dr. Metcalf provided a broad overview of the environment that m-learning inhabits with examples of how m-learning is being applied. There was a whole lot of information delivered in 75 minutes. The big concepts I came away with are:

Content is still king. Metcalf built his whole proposal around the concept that mlearning for learning purposes is an integral part of performance support. Knowledge needs to sit separate from learning modules and performance support systems so that both can pick and choose from that knowledge base.

Long and short of it. My thoughts during elearning sessions is that long learning interactions (more than 10 minutes) need to be interactive while shorter sessions (10 minutes or less) can be more passive because you are not asking learners to sit still for a long time.

Topics to follow up on. Transcoder as a device to send content to a variety of mobile devices in fashion that the device can read; and vXML as a programming tool to deliver mLearning.

Learning Must be Set Free!

Leave it to Larry Lessig to re-awaken (if only for a moment - I'm over 50 you know) my revolutionary zeal. But I challenge any corporate training organization to watch this video and still endorse the idea that training (and learning) be delivered via a learning management system.

LMS's represent the pinnacle of push training vs. pull learning. The learner can only access the material by registering for a course and getting permission. They cannot add or revise the materials that exist in the LMS, but must go underground and spread their ideas and concepts unofficially until they are either squelched or finally come to the attention of a management suit who likes the concept and adopts it as his or her own. That management type then takes the glory for an idea that was germinated by someone further down the organizational chart.

Second Life/Real Life

I know the learning world is slowly going ga-ga over the possibility of migrating learning to a Second Life environment, but I have to confess that I have my doubts that the environment is ready for prime time. But it is ready for lampooning. This video I think really hits upon what most people experience when they first enter Second Life.


via videosift.com

Whither Goes eLearning?

This article by AP (PCs Losing Their Relevance in Japan) may bear watching and considering its impact on the future of learning via technology. We have already begun the discussion about how to position elearning for mobile systems, but perhaps we should accelerate the discussion.

I wonder if anyone has explored how the learning management systems that corporations use to track learner progress will play with these devices.

Information R Us

Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the Kansas State University – the same man who provided us with the thought-provoking video "Web 2.0...The Machine is Us/ing Us" – is back with a new video about how the Web is changing how to archive and find information.


This piece has given me a lot to think about on a Sunday morning. Since I received my primary schooling before the public received access to the Internet and the World Wide Web, I recognize that I am still partially constrained by the concepts that Mr. Wesch presents in this new video.

Sure, I have made inroads into using the break-out concepts he records in this video, but I still find myself being pulled back to my roots and the need for some form of hierarchy. The need for organization, for structure, and for some form of expert to monitor and control information still exists. Not so much to tell us what to do or what to think, but to try and control the flow of information. Something like a traffic cop.

I could accept his suggestion that the hierarchy is no longer needed – that links and search engines are all that is required (or expected) – if I had some confidence that our schools are teaching our children how to search the web. There is a science (or maybe its an artform) to composing a finely-tuned search phrase. A means of getting around the commercial clutter that is returned on many search requests for information.

Maybe that needs to become the next phase in making our children computer literate. With computers common and freely available in schools and public libraries, the next big push in our schools must be teaching our children the language of the search engine so that they can find the information they need without being bombarded with useless information or commercial websites.

Halloween is just around the corner

Okay, it's a Saturday and I haven't posted anything in a while, but this is just too creepy for words. But it is perfect for Halloween!

I be' Mad Davy Kidd, Arrr!!!!

Ahoy me mateys! "Talk Like a Pirate Day"be next Wednesday. And since I be a land-lubber salty-dog wannabe, I be gettin' into the spirit of things. I decided to find out what my Pirate name would be. According to this quiz I be:

Mad Davy Kidd

Every pirate is a little bit crazy. You, though, are more than just a little bit. Even though you're not always the traditional swaggering gallant, your steadiness and planning make you a fine, reliable pirate. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from piratequiz.com.
part of the fidius.org network

If ye be wondering how to talk like a pirate, ye be needin' to watch this video:

Textbooks, are they needed?

And so the debate continues to rage. Stephen Downes responds to my position on the question of whether schools should buy textbooks or laptops.

School Textbooks, Yes or No ~ Stephen's Web ~ by Stephen Downes

I don't think it's radical at all. The money we spend on textbooks is wasted. We could put the same content onto websites, we could do it for free (because it's not like our academics are paid much of anything by publishers as it is) and the kids would be more comfortable with it.

In rereading my comments I believe I need to further elaborate on my position. I really agree that buying textbooks is a waste of money. They represent second source materials that, especially with social studies books, are watered down so as to be unoffensive to anyone. Does that mean the government should buy laptops for every student, or even require that parents buy them for their school-age children? No, being the father of three children I know how children unknowingly can be irresponsible. Let's face it, you drop a book on the ground you can pick it up and it still works. You drop a laptop on the ground and the chances it will still work diminish.

Please note, though, I said "if you drop a book on the ground...". I didn't say "textbook." There is a wealth of first source books that teachers can now draw upon to use in their lesson plans. And I am not precluding the use of technology in the classroom and at home, but don't go pouring money into buying laptops for students.

UPDATE:
Wow! I'm getting it from both sides, and once again I think its because I didn't express myself well. So here goes again.

To Manish's point, I am not against reading. In fact I argued that perhaps instead of textbooks teachers should use first-source books that were written by individuals who are tackling a particular topic and not trying to cover the spectrum of a curriculum. Now there are instances where, I think, textbooks are the way to go, specifically mathematics.

To Stephen's point, no technology is full-proof and while the OLPC computer is relatively inexpensive I can foresee a world of trouble when parents decide that it is not "good enough" for their child and have to buy something better. Thus, just like the sneakers wars, you see kids and their parents get into an ever escalating computer wars requiring kids to have the best laptop possible. Unfortunately, I tend to view government bureaucracies with disdain (having worked in one for three years) and I can envision school districts deciding that the OLPC computer is not enough and the budget for their purchases balloon ever upward. There is already a simmering taxpayer revolt against the money spent by school districts, I fear this would add to that revolt.

Now, I will say that flash memory drives maybe a useful alternative. I've written previously about their value as an alternative to participant guides in the corporate learning world. I could envision buying these and loading them with wiki software preloaded with links to images, video, audio, and yes, reading material that the child could use in school on classroom computers, study hall computers, and home computers.

By God, I love a lively debate!

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School textbooks, yes or no

There is a tremor within the blogosphere over the issue of school textbooks or to be more precise whether schools should continue to purchase them or re-channel the money to purchase "laptops and digital curriculum materials for students and teachers." Wesley Freyer appears to have fired the first shot with his post A call for a textbook purchasing moratorium. I'm looking at this from several different angles and I'm at a loss on where I stand on this.

As an instructional designer who creates training for corporations and government entities I see the textbooks we create--politely called "participant guides"--as close to useless. The standard approach is to take the PowerPoint slides used by the facilitator and output it with lines underneath for notetaking. I've always considered these as a waste of paper. I have advocated in the past that if we are going to go this route, then we should create them electronically and place them on an inexpensive jump drive. At least we are not overtly damaging the environment.

As a parent of three school-age children I would not want to think about the number of laptops the schools would have had to buy my children over the years. Being a proponent of technology, albeit a frugal one, I have obtained four previously-owned laptops for my children to use and only one is still working. Children are tough on laptops, just as they are tough on everything they own. A book can survive being dropped off the side of a bed a whole lot better than a computer.

Of course what makes a revolutionary, a revolutionary is his or her unbending resolution to the cause. So we have Stephen Downes disagreeing with Vicki Davis who argues that "I personally have to underline, write, rewrite, take notes in the margin and work with the text."

Stephen responds:

Now I use a computer to do this - and it's an important skill to have. Yes, some people still do it the old way. They shouldn't. And some people today just cut and paste from electronic texts. They shouldn't do that either - they are robbing themselves of their own learning if they do that.

That's a bit too radical for me. But I understand his viewpoint there needs to be a concerted effort to break old habits and I think Vicki is making that effort. I tend to agree with George Sieman who states:

I'm not convinced that technology is deterministic - i.e. that we must inexorably trudge the path down which it leads. The real call is one of systemic change - what needs to change to better prepare our students for tomorrow's world? Technology will no doubt play a part, but I'm not convinced that it must correspondingly be the tool through which the change is enacted.

Frankly, I would like to see schools stop spending money on textbooks simply because they are bland beyond compare, watered down so as not to offend anyone. Often control over what to purchase is not in the hands of the teacher, where it should lie, and instead is controlled by state boards of education who are often pressured by special interest groups.

Often the textbooks are so bad, teachers are forced to improvise and at times they improvise well. You go "electronic" as Wesley proposes will not resolve the problem. Textbooks will just migrate to e-books, the costs will probably remain the same, but the textbook publishers will just pocket the savings from not having to buy ink or paper.

The answer is not easy, but at the risk of sounding like someone who has been left on the wrong side of the digital divide, I think pencils, pens, paper, and books need to remain a piece of the overall educational puzzle. Let's not forget, these items were the first technologies introduced into the learning environment.

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Cosmos revisited

I forgot just how great the Carl Sagan documentary Cosmos was until I watched this 8 minute clip about evolution that I found at the blog Neatorama.

I haven't seen it since its first airing back in 1980, but ithis short clip makes me want to watch the whole thing again.

On Forgetting What We Learned

Quick blog item in response to a posting by Jay Cross. Jay was in Seattle last week for the 7th annual Gnomedex, a conference of "the world's leading bloggers, podcasters, and tech-savvy enthusiasts. On commenting about staying over for the unconference, Jay had this to say:

Internet Time Blog :: Forgetful in Seattle

tomorrow, raines cohen and kaliya hamlin are convening an unconference to process the official event. i just rearranged my flights so i can attend. instant replay may become de rigueur if people understand the mechanics of the forgetting curve. if you don’t reinforce what you learn, more than half of it will be gone a day or two later.


(Image from Jay Cross's Internet Time Blog)

This leaves me to wonder about learning retention rates in elearning courses. Let's face it, most entities that are investing in elearning are doing it on the cheap. By going the elearning route it saves them from having to a) send learners away to a classroom; b) feed them at the class; c) pay for trainers to appear; d) take SMEs away from their main productive job to deliver training, etc., etc.


Unfortunately, when they do go the elearning route, they often want to do that on the cheap, creating simple page-turners, possibly with narration and images, and a set of 10 or 20 multiple-choice questions at the end to validate that learning occurred.

Don't get me wrong I'm alright with that, it helps pay my bills, but it got me wondering how it would be possible to re-enforce learning from elearning courses. I figure there is a couple ways.

1. The first way might be to require the learner to retake the full course the next day to re-enforce what has been learned. This would be the simplest course, although it kind of smacks of brainwashing rather than facilitating learning.
   
2. Require the learner to retake the post-test to see how much of the previous day's learning stuck and then send the learner back to review the content that has been lost overnight, and only that content. This is technologically feasible, but I'm not sure all LMS's are up to the task.
3. The unconference approach seems to be the best bet, although I'm not convinced that higher-ups would buy into this.

The concept of elearning has been sold as an anytime, anywhere learning experience, which means every learner is entering and exiting the "classroom" at different times never even knowing if anyone else is in the classroom at the same time. But suppose you add a concept of an annual unconference on the topic is scheduled (either virtually or real-time) for everyone who has attended a specific elearning session. Let them discuss existing gaps and misunderstandings in their knowledge base amongst one another and generally support one another in filling those gaps and resolving those misunderstandings. Rather than sitting and listening to a facilitator they are building their own knowledge bases with the assistance of SMEs who only sit and listen, speaking up only to redirect conversations that appear to be going astray.

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Clicking through the lecture

Is this a piece of technology that the corporate world might want to consider for those lengthy lecture-driven presentations that often pass as training?

University of Delaware Responds to Classroom Clickers

Clickers are small wireless keypads that allow students to respond electronically to instructor questions at various points during class. They're generally especially useful in large lecture classes, where keeping all students engaged and at a similar level of understanding can be challenging.

According to the the article, students respond to prepared questions. I could foresee this as an opportunity for learners who would not normally wish to admit that they are not totally clear on a point, to "speak up" anonymously and let the presenter know that they need to focus some more time on the topic. If the presenter does not have the time to slow down on their presentation, the clicker device employed at the University of Delaware provides an opportunity for follow-up afterward.

Clicker responses are anonymous in class but are tracked by a device number, which is linked to a particular student. Some faculty members, for example, give a small amount of course credit to students for clicker responses.

Further review:

• Clickers in the Classroom by Douglas Duncan
• Educause Podcast: Clickers

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eLearning: More Than Just Page Turners

Curse you Stephen Downes! (he says tongue-in-cheek.) Every day I plan to start my day by browsing my learning blogs in Google Reader and I never seem to be able to get past Stephen's posts. Today he pointed me to Mark Bethelemy's post: The King is Dead – Long Live the King

For most (corporate) consumers of elearning, content means self-study modules, that sit in some sort of delivery system. In academic and formal education settings e-learning has a completely different connotation – involving collaboration, assessment, eportfolios etc – which is beginning to filter into the corporate space, but very slowly.

I've often thought about this and how page-turning elearning that resides inside the LMS firewall may not be conducive to facilitating lasting change. (I hate the term "change," but I use it for lack of a better word at this time.) As Mark points out, there is not freedom to branch, no ability to search, and unless specifically requested (and paid for) no ability to output the learning materials for later learning.

In an earlier post in May I had opined that

The LMS will function only as a registrant and as an assesor; all learning content will be housed on a separate server that can be accessed at any time without prior registration. The employee will be able to customize his or her PLE anyway they wish by dragging and dropping video, audio, whatever on to their page. Like Netvibes or Google, they can have multiple tabs on their PLE to divy up content.

This is very similar, but more limited then, Mark's comments:

6. Allowing users to connect with other people who are using the materials – perhaps creating reviews, adding ratings or making recommendations – is more a function of the delivery system rather than the content (unless the content is totally embedded into the delivery system pages). We do need an alternative model for learning management systems (as proposed by Tony Karrer a while back) I've long argued for a model based on that of the successful ecommerce providers such as Amazon, where the learning content is the product. The reviews and ratings would provide critical metadata for the learners.
   
   
7. Allowing materials to be targeted to particular users based on prior history, on stated preferences or on management requirements is exactly the Amazon model. It would provide a combined performance support and knowledge provision system. If combined with user generated content and a means of finding other people in the organisation with similar interests you then have an extremely powerful and effective learning marketing system – where learning can become an integral part of the organisational culture, rather than just an add-on.

In hind sight I might have read Tony's post on the future of LMS back in January and it subconsciously influenced my May post (belated hat tip to Tony!).

I could go on and on, but I have already budgeted 45 minutes to reading Mark's post, posting a replay at his site, and then drafting this post. Which means I will have to delay any further blog reading until this evening. But it was well worth it.

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Solid tips for Synchronous 3T

This article on 10 tips to facilitate Online Training for Online Faculty. My favorite:

Provide multiple ways of learning for multiple learning styles. Faculty going through training to teach online will come from a variety of academic disciplines and will have predilections in their thought processes reflective of their fields. So, have training modules produced as full text descriptions, narrated animations, step-by-step graphics, and quick checklists so that learners can use whichever one resonates with them.

In training, I think the corporate and government world all too often forget about providing performance support tools. We figure, "Hey, they got a participant's guide. What else do they want?"

Trends in the Living Networks: Launching the Web 2.0 Framework

Once again, Jay Cross points me to a blog post that totally blows me out of the water with its clarity of purpose. He pointed me to Ross Dawson's Trends in the Living Networks: Launching the Web 2.0 Framework. (Just follow the link above to read Ross's description and to download the full four-slide presentation.)

It truly does summarize the role and elements of the Web 2.0 phase of the Internet better then I could ever achieve. Ross captures it all in three slides. It took me 15 slides. I am humbled by greatness.

Following the links...

So this morning I started reading my learning-related blogs and I didn't get far into my read before I was off for a half-hour following the links. I began at my Google Reader and I started at Stephen Downes' feed titled "Going After Grandma!" What caught my eye was the first line that read:

I think I like the term 'Platform of personal Expression' (PPE) better than 'Personal learning Environment'...

Being extremely interested in personal learning environments I continued reading his post. Which, unfortunately turned into a rant against an extremely long post by Wayne Hodgins who was responding to another long blog post by David Berlind at ZDNET regarding the inventor of the blog and the role of APIs in making publishing on the web transparent enough that your grandmother can do it.

By following the bread crumb trail from Stephen's post to Wayne Hodgins post and on to David Berlind's post I probably learned a lot more about the history of web publishing and the future of APIs, but in doing so I expended more than an hour by following the link of a single blog post. And if you count the time expended composing this post to my own web log, it will be probably an hour and a half. I've learned a great deal on a single topic simply by keying in on a phrase that is a focal point in my learning: "personal learning environment."

As I write this I am extending my research as I seek out links to connect people to concepts that they might not be fully aware of, such as "personal learning environments." This means I'm branching off even further. In the end one blog post in Google Reader took me to eight different sites (roughly). There was no curriculum, no formal lesson plan, just plain, old-fashioned curiosity fired up by a single phrase. In essence, informal learning. My path looked like this: