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:

Talkin' 'bout my generation...

A lot of my learning occurs applying something old with something new. The old element is reading, the new element is electronic media.

I started this lunch hour reading a post by Jay Cross regarding a blog post by Author Penelope Trunk regarding basing what generation we belong to based on our use of media instead of age.

Despite the fact that I was born at the start of the space age I never really considered myself a Baby Boomer. Perhaps it's because I'm a propeller head, always eager to learn a new technology and how to apply it to a learning venue. Most of the true boomers that I know have barely enough computer savvy to compose an email. So I eagerly took Ms. Trunk's quiz to determine what generation I would fall into. I will disclose where I mapped myself to after you have a chance to take the test yourself.

What generation are you part of, really? Take this test. » Brazen Careerist by Penelope Trunk:

Do you have your own web page? (1 point)

Have you made a web page for someone else? (2 points)

Do you IM your friends? (1 point)

Do you text your friends? (2 points)

Do you watch videos on YouTube? (1 point)

Do you remix video files from the Internet? (2 points)

Have you paid for and downloaded music from the Internet? (1 point)

Do you know where to download free (illegal) music from the Internet? (2 points)

Do you blog for professional reasons? (1 point)

Do you blog as a way to keep an online diary? (2 points)

Have you visited MySpace at least five times? (1 point)

Do you communicate with friends on Facebook? (2 points)

Do you use email to communicate with your parents? (1 point)

Did you text to communicate with your parents? (2 points)

Do you take photos with your phone? (1 point)

Do you share your photos from your phone with your friends? (2 points)

Scoring

0-1 point - Baby Boomer
2-6 points - Generation Jones
6- 12 points - Generation X
12 or over - Generation Y

I am proud to say that fell fully where I expected to land, A generation Y. I scored 15 points out of a total of 24 points. What does this mean for learning? It means that from an instructional design perspective we need to promote with our clients a move away from the 1 day (or more) marathon training delivery model and move more towards a learning buffet where learners can select their own learning opportunities.

In fact a buffet, in my mind, is an excellent metaphor. Go into any buffet and you will see that, despite the fact that everything from salad to desserts are laid out in advance, people will continue to follow the time honored appetizer, main meal, and dessert approach to serving their own meals. They may eat more than is necessary for a normal person, but they do seem to serve themselves in the traditional fashion.

I would like to imagine that learners would follow the same approach starting with introductory materials and working upwards through advanced programs. These elements would be chunked accordingly and offered in one hour or less chunks similar to many webinars.

July's Big Question

I'm blogging this from the Cedar Rapids Airport where there is free wifi. I'm finally taking the time to respond to The Learning Circuit Blog'sBig Question for July: Choosing Tools. I arrived here after seeing an email from a coworker that noted that Karl Kapp mentioned me in his blog (picture me blushing) in his response to the question. There is not much that I can add to what he said, but here's my brief take before boarding my flight home.

How does the eLearning design process need to change to accommodate such a wide variety of tools?

The eLearning design process does need to change at least for those of us who are independent contractors. We need to be aware not only of the variables that are available, but their pluses and limitations, then we need to be able to clearly communicate these variables to our customers. In addition. I would add that the tools we are discussing (wikis, blogs, virtual worlds, etc.) can be used in the classroom as well as in the elearning venue, and we need to make our customers aware of these opportunities.

How does the tool selection process need to change?

We need to be collaborating with our customers on implementing these additional tools. For instance, in an instructor-led class, video could be used in role-playing to create more realistic feedback to classroom activities.

What should learning professionals do to stay up-to-speed? Do they need to learn new tools constantly? Can they stick with a few tools?

This one is a no-brainer. We are learning professionals we should be keeping up to date with the latest tools, just as any other professional. You don't see many carpenters using an old-fashioned hammer for jobs that require hammering a massive number of nails, they have quickly adapted to using automatic hammers. In some instances where commercial vendors are attempting to sell their products they offer free webinars and 30-day downloads that we can play with. For other web 2.0 tools such as wikis, blogs, 2nd Life, etc., we need to be willing to roll up our sleeves and try out these applications.

Will this trend continue? If so, then what does that imply for us?
Of course this trend will continue; technology development will continue apace and we need to keep our eyes peeled for new trends. Fortunately, we have social networks that can get the word out about new tools and applications. We just need to keep our eyes open to these new tools and not be afraid to try them out.

I Declare "Design Day!"

In going back and reading the comments on Tony Karrer's eLearning Technology blog post titled Podcasting has No Inherent Pedagogical Value I reread Karl Kapp's initial comment. What struck me was this:

So, maybe we should declare a Design Day and everyone in the training/education Blogosphere blogs about Good Design and not about technology. (I know we have the Big Question...but maybe this could be seperate.)

I hereby take him up on his challenge.

My take on good design is that it needs to be (in order of importance)

1. Relevant. The learning needs to be something that the learner needs and can use. Don't get bogged down explaining corporate philosophy and value to the shareholder
   
2. Timely. This goes hand in hand with relevancy. It has to be made available when the learner needs it, not when the LMS says he or she can attend. I know this doesn't really get to design and I am flirting with technology discussion, but I think the design issue here is how the material is developed. Is it chunked appropriately so that it can be digested in little bits and can be easily searched to locate the critical learning bit when it is needed.
3. Engaging. What passes for engaging in most training is really just something to keep learners from falling asleep in their seats. True learning does not occur unless the learner can actively try out what is being taught. The closer to reality the better.

This is off the cuff thoughts, but I think it gets to the heart of good design. I challenge others to respond.

Practicing What They Preach

The current issue of The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning is devoted solely to mlearning possibilities of mlearning.

What I found particularly interesting was the fact that each article can be accessed as an HTML document, a PDF document, or an mp3 audio file.

Of course, the audio file is of course lacking any tables, figures, images, footnotes or bibliography, but it tells you up front this fact and advises to access the HTML or .PDF versions of the presentation.

Also, the voice itself is a computer-based voice, but if you place content above presentation then the computer-based voice is not insurmountable.

Response to "Pimp my Course"

So I was reading through my favorite learning blogs this morning when I came across this post by Stephen Downes recounting the blogosphere reaction to an academic professor's article at The Chronicle of Higher Education. The article by Rob Jenkins, an associate professor of English and director of the Writers Institute at Georgia Perimeter College, does appear a bit snarky when it deals with education: Pimp My Course.

So far I haven't done a very good job. Though not exactly a neo-Luddite, I never fully signed on to the electronic revolution, despite the fact that, like many two-year colleges, mine is mega-wired, with at least one computer in each classroom. Most also have overhead data projectors, many have Smart Boards or Sympodiums, and a few are even dedicated to computer-assisted instruction, with 24 stations each.

I confess that in the past I've grossly underutilized those resources, frittering them away in such pedestrian activities as projecting students' sentences onto the whiteboard (where I, of course, proceed to rip them to shreds with a red Expo marker) and allowing students to use their computer workstations to edit and revise rough drafts in class (when they aren't looking at MySpace).

But is the solution to Mr. Jenkins' article merely to heap disdain upon him? Even Mr. Downes, whom I respect for his efforts to advance the use of technology in education dismisses Mr. Jenkins' writing with "I call it the characteristically lazy and sloppy journalism that serves as the best evidence we could ask for regarding the increasing irrelevance of traditional media." I'm not about to dismiss traditional media, heck, I'm not even sure Mr. Jenkins' article was traditional media, unless traditional media is anything you have to read.

But beyond that point I would like to offer up a few suggestions to Mr. Jenkins.

1. You don't have to jump head first into the deep end of the educational technology pool. You obviously have stuck your toe in and the water was apparently two chilly for you. I recommend you go to the shallow end and enter gradually.
2. Take a look at this great YouTube video which sums up the whole Web 2.0 thing. If you don't want to leave this post (and I'm honored that you think I am being of assistance), here's that same video linked into this post.
   
   
3. Don't just talk to your colleagues, talk to your IT department, especially those responsible for assisting the distance learning element of your school to run their classes.
4. Ask your students what they think. Sometimes its best to go to the source, while I appreciate that you have much more experience teaching then they do it does not mean you discount totally what the customer wants. Just look at what happened to the big Detroit automakers as gas prices began spiraling upwards in the mid70s to today. People abandoned them and their gas guzzling products for the more dependable fuel-efficient imports that now seem to rule the marketplace.

Technology in the classroom is not an all or nothing equation. I'm sure your IT department will be more than willing to advise you as you move forward.

Future of ISD

So I'm reading the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath and its leaving my mind a whirl of ideas and possibilities. The main premise of the book is that to make ideas stick you must craft a message that the listener can easily recall through the use of metaphors that they can relate to and can be easily recalled. But I digress.

While reading the chapter on developing messages that are concrete in which the authors argue that you can reach more people with concrete ideas rather than abstract notions, I have another aha! moment. I seem to be having a lot of these lately. As you may or may not be aware I have been laboring to figure where I, as an instructional designer, fit into a world where informal learning seems to be the future.

Then it came to me. Maybe it was a result of watching the latest episode of Dr. Who the night before, an episode called The Shakespeare Codes, that instructional designers need to learn to be Bards, to tell concrete stories that convey the Subject Matter Experts' abstractions. Some stories can be minute mysteries while others can be longer opuses. The key is that the learner can access them at any time without jumping through a lot of LMS hoops.

An "Aha" Moment

I was viewing Stephen Downes vodcast titled: Web 2.0 and Your Own Learning and Development. I'm doing research on personal learning environments for a presentation of my own when Mr. Downes said something that really made me stop and think, in fact I rewound the video to listen again to what he had to say. (approximately 16:40 into the video)

The last place you want to get your information is in a formal classroom. Why? Because you are taking a class you don't need it now, you need it when you are out doing work or something like that. So what you want to do for the most part is shun formal classes and sessions in favor of informal activities. That's not to say you should never take a formal class, a formal class is great for an information dump, but if you want information finely tuned to your needs you're going to have to look to informal methods.

I have been trying to clarify in my own mind how formal training/education fits into the new world of informal learning that people such as Stephen Downes or Jay Cross have been advocating. I mean, what Mssrs. Downes and Cross have been advocating made sense to me, but I always felt that informal learning could not work without formal education. How could a person conceive what type of immediate learning is needed if they were not aware of the general scope of the issue.

Say, for example a researcher is hired by a pharmaceutical firm. Being new to the company, she has no idea how they monitor their drug trials; she may know in general how drug trials are run, but each of individual pharmaceutical company will have its own policies and procedures. Without a formal learning session where she is introduced to these policies and procedures she is left to learn on her own, which, in the pharmaceutical world can be extremely dangerous.

So she attends the formal training and receives the data dump over a course of say 3 days. In my early days of learning about instructional design I recall being told something along the line that 75% of what a learner is provided in the training session is forgotten within an hour of leaving the class if it is not immediately applied and 90% is lost within three days of the training. As I recall these figures were presented as an argument for incorporating practice sessions within the class so that the learner can apply their new knowledge.

Having been on the receiving end of training where practice was provided I can argue that the loss of the skills presented in the training occurred anyway if I did not apply them outside the classroom. (Either that or I'm just a poor student.) This is where informal learning comes into play and the responsibility of the employer to provide the informal resources for the employee to refresh in their mind what they learned.

This could be via:

• Procedural guides published as wikis in which the end users at the very least can comment on the information so that they can recommend changes that improve the process being performed
• Blogs that can provide them with alerts to changes in policy, government regulations, etc.
• Chat rooms or groups where they can share information and ideas
• Podcasts and vodcasts that discuss critical elements in their activities that they can use to recall what was presented in the information dump that was the formal training
• Web-based simulations that allow them to fine-tune their activities.

As an instructional designer I've been worried that if informal learning takes off my job would go away, but as I see it now, even with informal learning their will still be an increased demand for content development to satisfy both the formal and informal aspects of learning.

Podcasting and Education

This news article from Campus Technology suggests podcasting does not add to "learning." Consensus: Podcasting Has No 'Inherent' Pedagogic Value

A bevy of recent studies on students' experience listening to recorded lectures via podcasts confirms what many lecturers already know: that the pedagogical value of podcasts depends almost entirely on student motivation and the learning "context" of the application.

The article links to a longer Carnegie Mellon University report, A Teaching with Technology White Paper: Podcasting, that suggests that replacing in-person lectures with video or audio lectures is not advisable, but does think there is a place for podcast lectures as refreshers or as supplemental materials or even as homework assignments. The Carnegie Mellon white paper reviewed three experiments in lecture podcasting at:

• the University of Michigan School of Dentistry
• Harvard Extension School
• the University of Washington

Some of the findings I found interesting from those experiments include:

• Audio podcasts were preferred over video podcasts or podcasts with audio and still images
• Majority of students listened/viewed lecture podcasts at a computer despite the flexibility of loading it to an mp3 player or iPod
• Most used the podcasts as a refresher from actual classroom lectures and downloading increased when the podcasts were syndicated via an RSS feed
• The real potential of podcasts is to design as supplementary material designed specifically for the format. One approach is "sonic sessions" that interpret one or two important topics and offer questions for considerion.
• Another use of podcasts is having students create podcasts for the instructor to review. One example, students working pairs created 6 to 10 minute video podcasts "sharing something that they learned during the previous class.

I believe there is great potential for podcasting as a learning tool. Note, I do not say a training tool because I think as we shift from solely bricks and mortar to digital education systems, the emphasis is placed on the learner to build their learning environment as opposed to the pre-digital world were parents, educators, or employers dictated that the learner will give their time to the teacher/professor/trainer.

We need to take these findings to heart, because the people involved are what we call digital natives and are supposed to take to learning 2.0 technologies like fish to water.

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Don't blog, write...

So says Jakob Nielson in his latest Alertbox

Write Articles, Not Blog Postings (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

You probably already know my own Internet strategy, so it might not surprise you that I recommended that he should instead invest his time in writing thorough articles that he published on a regular schedule. Given limited time, this means not spending the effort to post numerous short comments on ongoing blogosphere discussions. (bold facing is from original)

To a large degree I have to agree with him given the context in which he positions his argument, i.e., he was advising "a world leader in his field" on whether the leader should start a weblog.

Mr. Nielsen then goes on to explain in what he himself calls "...a very long article, stuffed with charts and statistical concepts..." why it is not in the best interest for the world leader to emulate most blogs being published. A great number of these consist of short posts  (maximum 7 to 10 paragraphs) linking to a news article, report, or some other official publication and providing the writer's opinion of that linked item.

Mr. Nielsen recommends that longer, well-researched articles posted on a regular basis should be the model the world leader follow, if that world leader wishes to make money from his or her efforts. Of course this sounds like the old model "White Paper" that can already be found on a great number of corporate websites, which, ironically are given away for free.

While I agree there is a log of chafe that a reader has to wade through (including this site) to find the nuggets in the blog world, I can't help but feel that Mr. Nielsen has a real problem with what he dismisses at the end of his article as the "so-called Web 2.0 movement."

Having been a loyal reader of Mr. Nielsen for probably about 6 years I couldn't help detect a bit of peevish elitism coming through in this article and he misses the value of the blog as a means of leveling the publishing playing field and where ideas can come from the most unexpected places, not just handed down on high from "world leaders."

For instance, after throwing a fig leaf to blogs by arguing that they have a role in business as project blogs, he argues that "[b]logs are also fine for websites that sell cheap products...For many B2B sites with long sales cycles, quick hits...are insufficient. Instead, these sites need to build up long-term customer relationships based on respect." What sales has to do with his world leader is beyond my grasp.

But then it appears that the way people use blogs appears to be beyond Mr. Nielsen's understanding. He writes as if people use search engines to find blog posts.

The beauty of the blogosphere is that it's a self-organizing system. Whenever something good appears, other blogs link to it and it gets promoted in the system and gains higher visibility. Thus, the 24 postings that are better than our expert's very best attempt will gain higher prominence, even though they're written by people with lower overall expertise.

But the beauty of blogs is that the people the world leader wants to influence are not those who are going to stop after the first 24 returns, but who will continue to dig. And once they find that world leader's blog they will subscribe to it and receive all future postings automatically.

Ironically, I fear that any world leader that follows Mr. Nielsen's concluding advice will suffer the same fate (figuratively speaking) as Marie Antoinette whom it paraphrases.

Elite, expertise-driven sites are the exception to the rule. For these sites, you don't care about 90% of users, because they want a lower level of quality than you provide and they'll never pay for your services. People looking for the quick hit and free advice are not your customers. Let them eat cake; let them read Wikipedia.

But that's just my opinion, for what its worth.

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Will Blog for Money

Could there be a lucrative future in ghost-blogging? For the right price I would be willing to serve as the online presence for a wealthy executive or high-profile Hollywood type.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Are my online friends for real?

As Facebook continues its explosive growth here's one question troubling me. Are my friends for real?

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Flash drives for learners

Fleeting thought for the morning. What if ITL classrooms have dedicated laptops for each learner seat. Then each learner will be given a USB flash drive that has been programmed to autolaunch some sort of knowledge storage, such as a standalone wiki like Tiddlywiki, that contains the participant's guide and links to other job aids.

USB flash drives are dirt cheap nowadays and would make a great takeaway from the training.

How much is too much?

So I have a client who expressed concern about reusing certain images in an elearning course my employer is creating for them. The problem is that the size of the course is so large and its subject matter is so intense (WMD response) that the number of images are limited.

So as I review images being used I am wrestling with the question of how much is too much. I recall that Ken Burn's lengthy documentary on the Civil War seemed to reuse certain images that had emotional impact repeatedly. Of course he also zoomed in close to the image and then panned across it to create a sense of moving pictures.

I would like to think that certain reuse of dynamic pictures is acceptable if it helps to either:

1. Reinforce the surrounding content
2. Serve to make the information more memorable.
   

Wikis in a nutshell

Here's everything you need to know about wikis in less than 4 minutes.

Valuable Tips for Running Small Wikis

The folks at Teaching Hacks.com
posted a lengthy article offering valuable recommendations about
running a small wiki. They observe that a small wiki with 50
contributors cannot be run the same way as Wikipedia, which has 43,000 contributors. Read the whole article: Tips on Developing a Wiki Community.

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