The Social Media Gender Gap

Business Week has a fascinating report that instructional designers should keep in mind before floating Web 2.0 ideas to a customer. In the article The Social Media Gender Gap suggests women are more apt to adopt web 2.0 applications then men.

It's no shock that men and women act differently online, just as they do in everyday life. The Web is an extremely social medium, and Web 2.0 is all about being social. Traditionally, men are the early adopters of new technologies. But when it comes to social media, women are at the forefront. At Rapleaf we conducted a study of 13.2 million people and how they're using social media. While the trends indicate both sexes are using social media in huge numbers, our findings show that women far outpace the men.

Hat tip to MetaFilter community blog which also points to articles that Twitter appears to be the one social media that is dominated by men.

Creative Commons Flickr Photo from Kanaka’s Paradise Life.

Evolutionary Dead-end?

Interesting observation about technology at the webblog Boing Boing.

Every gadget expands until it becomes a PC. Any gadget that does not so expand is replaced by one that will.

It sure seems that way. Comment was in reference to a post at its sister blog Boing Boing Gadgets about the digital picture frame shown here.

Recently at Boing Boing Gadgets - Boing Boing

List of Cultural and Educational Video Sites

Open Culture blog provides a list of 35 cultural and educational video sites.

Looking for great cultural and educational video? Then you’ve come to the right place. Below, we have compiled a list of 35 sites that feature intelligent videos. This list was produced with the help of our faithful readers, and it will grow over time. If you find it useful, please share it as widely as you can. And if we’re missing good sites, please list them in the comments below.

Movie camera photo courtesy of: domi-san’s photostream on flickr.

The Social Web as a New Walled Garden

Interesting perspective from Wired magazine on the future of Social Web.

The social web trend is more or less complete. Oprah's gone Twitter, your co-worker has a MySpace problem, and if your parents aren't bugging you with Facebook movie quiz invites, they probably will be by the time you're done reading this. People are flocking to these sites in record numbers, as Facebook now boasts over 200 million users worldwide, and Twitter has grown 3,000 percent since last year. But for the social web to evolve into its final stage and take flight, the walls that separate these services, their users and everything they create will have to come down.

The article then suggests that once again we are building silos that restrict communications.

Leo Laporte, a broadcaster who runs the popular TWiT network of technology podcasts, calls the phenomenon "the social silo," and he doesn't think it can last much longer. "People are pouring all this content and value into individual sites," says Laporte, "but they aren't going to want to keep dealing with Facebook, and Twitter, and FriendFeed, and whatever is next." Laporte and Owyang agree that in order for the social web to move forward, the separate ecosystems which make it up need to unite.

Of course the assumption that we all want to share with one another is just that an assumption, one predicated that we desire to be of one herd that is in constant communication.

Creative Commons photo from Eggman’s Flickr photo stream.

Dual Perspectives Article

Fair Use Video

The American University's Center for Social Media posted this video describing guidelines for Fair Use of copyright material when creating new videos.

The video is part of a larger site focusing on Fair Use issues including a section for teachers.

Hat Tip: BoingBoing

On Writing Solid Emails

For better or worse email has become the gold standard of communications in our world. We use it to communicate not only with our superiors and coworkers, but also with family and friends. We use it for both professional and personal reasons and like any form of communication that has broadened out to the masses it has become misused.

Harvard Business Publishing has a well thought-out piece on writing email, that could also apply to blog writing. Most of it is common sense that has been repeated extensively in other articles, but repeating it is like the weeding that gardeners have to constantly engage in.

Most email (and blog) writing has moved beyond its original context as a form of formal communication to a more on-the-fly, asynchronous communication tool for those who do not want to engage in a conversation with the email recipient. In that venue, the recommendations proposed by the author David Silverman, may not totally apply, although, even some of his 10 points are worthwhile to consider.

But for formal communications that are going to two or more people, his points are invaluable.

1. Delete redundancies. Say it once. That's enough. If you're repetitive, the reader will stop reading and start skimming. (Like you probably just did.)

2. Use numbers and specifics instead of adverbs and adjectives. "The project is currently way behind schedule on major tasks," is not as clear as "The project is 3 weeks late delivering hamburger buns to Des Moines." (If you don't have numbers, still get rid of the adverbs and adjectives.)

3. Add missing context. Does your reader know that hamburger buns in Iowa are required for the company to collect $37 million? If you're not sure, remind them.

4. Focus on the strongest argument. Should those hamburger buns get shipped because the delay is embarrassing for the company, because it's costing children their lunch, or because it's costing the company tens of millions of dollars? Maybe all three, but one of those reasons (and it depends on your reader) will be enough to get buns on the road.

5. Delete off-topic material. The best emails say one thing and say it clearly. One-subject emails also make it easier for the recipient to file the message once they've taken action, something anyone who uses Outlook to manage tasks appreciates.

6. Seek out equivocation and remove it. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" works for Dickens, not status reports.

7. Kill your favorites. Is something in your text particularly pithy, amusing, or clever? Chance are, it's not. If it sticks out, it's probably a tap-dancing gorilla in boxer shorts — hilarious when you thought of it, embarrassing when it gets in your manager's inbox.

8. Delete anything written in the heat of emotion. Will this sentence show them who's been right about the hamburger buns since the beginning? Yes? Cut it.

9. Shorten. Remember the reader struggling to digest your message on the run — a BlackBerry or an iPhone gets about 40 words per screen. What looks short on your desktop monitor is an epic epistle on their mobile device.

10. Give it a day. With time, what seemed so urgent may no longer need to be said. And one less email is something everyone will thank you for.

I recommend reading through the comments for additional observations about email etiquette.

Hat tip to Basil White for the Summarization flow chart shown in this post.

How to Revise an Email So That People Will Read It - David Silverman - HarvardBusiness.org

Educational or Over the Top: You Decide

According to the poster of this video on You Tube, this is an actual safety video shown at a training session.

 

A quick Google search did turn up this site selling the video for $229. Don't know if its the same or not. Their description is:

This hard-hitting meeting opener will capture your employees' attention and show them just how easily accidents can happen. This video is an ideal way to start any safety meeting and features 10 accidents accompanied by victim testimony to set the tone for your next training session.

Because it is for sale I don't know how long it will remain posted on You Tube. So see it while you can.

The Dangers of Informal Learning

I place this in the category of the dangers of putting too much emphasis on informal learning. There was obviously no emphasis on documentation which is a key ingredient in top-down learning which is the key to formal learning. The Sunday Herald of Scotland reports that the U.S. and Great Britain cannot refurbish Trident missiles because they "forgot how to manufacture a component of the warhead."

Plans to refurbish Trident nuclear weapons had to be put on hold because US scientists forgot how to manufacture a component of the warhead, a US congressional investigation has revealed.

The US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) "lost knowledge" of how to make a mysterious but very hazardous material codenamed Fogbank. As a result, the warhead refurbishment programme was put back by at least a year, and racked up an extra $69 million.

Somewhere along the line a decision was made by upper management not to document the process; relying instead on existing personnel to remember and to record.

But vital information on how Fogbank was actually made had somehow been mislaid. "NNSA had lost knowledge of how to manufacture the material because it had kept few records of the process when the material was made in the 1980s, and almost all staff with expertise on production had retired or left the agency," the report said.

This is occurring increasingly throughout all sectors of our economy, especially now when managers are struggling to make ends meet without having to layoff more personnel then absolutely necessary. But at what cost? How much knowledge will be lost as senior employees accept buy-out packages to retire early or high-end achievers leave during or ahead of cutbacks?

I blame management for not seeing the value of documenting their processes and providing employees with the time and the means to document their best practices during the "good" times before this economic downturn. Too much tribal knowledge was left ungathered because we thought the good times would never end and we would always have our tribal elders to pass on their knowledge through informal learning practices.

Well, what these economic times remind us is that even though we have moved way beyond the hunter/gatherer ancestors we are still held thrall by seasonal changes. I fear that as economic winter sets in a great deal of knowledge will be lost.

Hat tip: Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds

The Sunday Herald - Scotland's award-winning independent newspaper

Wasn't the Internet Cute Back in 1981

This vintage news report demonstrates how the news media had no real clue about the possibilities of the Internet.

Hat Tip: IO9

Helpful Reminder for All Designers

As we go about our daily design efforts under the pressure of increasingly tight schedules we sometimes forget about the people who will be sitting in front of their computer screens trying to digest the elearning we develop. This presentation - Dumping the Drone - by Cathy Moore is a helpful reminder of how we should be developing content.

Dump the Drone: Livelier Elearning

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: design instructional)

del.icio.us Tags: instructional design,instruction,writing

What Can Training Departments Learn from Our President's Experiences

A report in the New York Times last Friday provides an interesting parable for the corporate training world that is looking towards Web 2.0 as a new avenue to deliver training. The article, titled Obama 2.0: Who's Leading Who?, notes that the leadership team around our new Chief Executive is discovering that once they let the genie out of the bottle they cannot get him back in. At the heart of the story is the fact that the grassroots elements that Team Obama connected with, in part using web 2.0 technology, are now continuing to demand the face time they had during the campaign.

Not everyone is sure, however, that once in office, President Obama will be able to marshall his online forces and engage them against his targets. Now organized, they may decide to move against him.

That’s already happened, wrote Ari Melber yesterday at the Nation, noting that the previous week a question about whether Obama would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate possible Bush Administration war crimes had been voted to the top of citizens’ questions submitted to the new administration via Change.gov. An Obama spokesman tried to dodge the question, but it didn’t go away:

It is striking that Obama’s aides, who helped win the election by harnessing new media, believed they could just spin away from their online interlocutors. Instead, the move backfired immediately. Bob Fertik, the activist who submitted the question, campaigned for it; and progressive websites, including thenation.com, blasted the dodge. Within a day, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann picked up the story. A day later, Obama was compelled to answer the question in an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, who quoted it and pressed Obama with two follow-ups. Obama’s answer, which prioritized moving “forward” but did not rule out a special prosecutor, made the front page of the January 12 New York Times.

So what does this mean for corporate training departments. I would suggest it means the end of the learning management system as a gatekeeper for training. It could signal the end of the existing static training experience (whether in the classroom or over the corporate intranet) in which information is dumped on the learner with a few exercises or multiple choice questions thrown in to break up the monotony. More importantly, learners are not going to stand by and just absorb information and then walk away and do what the training intended them to do. Web 2.0 will no longer allow that.

At least in the classroom they can ask questions and talk among themselves. I think in the elearning environment the days of the standard elearning course has to come to an end. Business likes elearning because the learner can take it at any time, any where. More importantly, the learner can be easily interrupted and pulled out of the learning experience to handle more profitable issues. If the training is programmed with bookmarking, the learner will not even lose their place.

In the future, elearning cannot be delivered in this fashion. The new generation of workers are not going to allow it. They are going to require that they have the ability to communicate with an expert and with one another. It is going to require creation of a cadre who will take the course at the same time and will have access to some form of online chat so that they can talk to one another as well as to a subject matter expert. The SME does not need to actively present the material, but he or she will be actively monitoring the chat session to answer questions as they appear.

Most important, it is going to require that the top-down model of communication in the company is going to have to relinquish some control over the learning environment.

Hat Tip to Will Thalheimer

del.icio.us Tags: elearning,learning,Web 2.0

Better Read then Dead

Okay, I know that is mighty strange headline for a blog post, but what the heck, I’m in that kind of mood. The point I’m trying to make is that I used to think I could never read an ebook. I always thought that I had to have  the dead tree version of a book to be able to enjoy the read.

I want to say right now: I WAS WRONG!!!!

To the right you see my most recent gadget. It’s a Samsung Blackjack; not as sexy as an Apple  iPhone, but for my money its just as good. I’ve coupled it with my home version of Microsoft Office 2007 so I can create and edit documents to my heart’s content.

But my most recent addition to my Blackjack is the addition of Mobipocket ebook Reader. This free software has turned my Blackjack into a mobile library of books and documents. My most recent read, which I highly recommend, is Cory Doctrow’s Little Brother, a dystopian tale of the Department of Homeland Security run amok and the efforts of a band of teenagers to resist.

Other books I have read using my Blackjack include:

• Fallen Angels by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle & Michael Flynn
• West of Honor by Jerry Pournelle
• The Scarlet Plague By Jack London
• The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons by F Scott Fitzgerald
• Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (in progress)

All of these book, except for Atlas Shrugged are available for free. Mobipocket ebook Reader also provides the ability to import web documents, .pdf files, and office documents and converts them to their reader. Whenever I connect my Blackjack to my computer Mobipocket will ask if I want to synchronize my library. I have met the future and it is wonderful.

del.icio.us Tags: ebooks,technology

Learning in Hard Economic Times: A Delicate Balancing Act

Harold Jarche has an interesting post concerning innovation and learning that I post here in its entirety.

In Innovating in the Great Disruption, Scott Anthony suggests three disciplines necessary to foster innovation in difficult economic times - placing a premium on progress; mastering paradox; and learning to love the low end. He also discusses the importance of learning;

" Innovators will need to continue to find creative, cheap ways to bring their ideas forward. Fortunately, they can tap into a plethora of powerful tools to facilitate rapid learning."

Rapid learning is not PowerPoint slides turned into online courses but rather increasing the ways to connect ideas and people. This is the future of training and e-learning, or what I call ABC (anything but courses). Anthonys third point, love the low end, also speaks to the use of inexpensive tools such as web services or open source software. If learning professionals can be seen as catalysts for innovation, then even in difficult times will their future look bright.

While I will agree that the corporate world is mistaken in believing that a one-day or two-day training program is sufficient to develop employees in a specific process, I fear that Harold is going overboard with his "ABC" idea. Without a base, formal presentation of some sort to provide a framework for ongoing learning between people you could end up with a case of the blind men describing the elephant.

Harold is correct in stating that "[r]apid learning is not turning PowerPoint slides into online courses," but it is also not a matter of setting up a bunch of social web services to facilitate discussion. In fact what is telling about the quote he provides is what preceded it.

While more and more companies recognize the name of the game is transformation, the tolerance for blind experimentation has never been lower.

And that is too true. In times like these, the corporate world looks to cost centers such as training as the first place to make cuts. So any proposed innovation will require a balance between something old and something new, which is what I suggested way back in 2007.

Harold Jarche » Innovation and Learning

del.icio.us Tags: learning,informal learning,formal learning

Lunch and Learning Objectives

 Will Thalheimer has been providing a series of brown bag webinars called Webinoshs and the latest is about learning objectives. Here's the 411:

FREE Webinosh on Instructional Objectives This Friday January 9th, I will talk about Instructional Objectives, and some research, thereof. Instructional Objectives:

• Do they produce learning results?
• Are they all the same?
• Do we have to use them?
• Do prequestions work just as well?
• How specifically do they have to be worded?
• Can I use the word "Understand"? Answer: In some of them, but not others.
• Hey Will, do you have a new taxonomy for us?

To sign-up just go to https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/247154110.

del.icio.us Tags: learning objectives,learning,objectives

Life’s (and death’s) little jokes

 

I always get a kick out of seeing headlines  like this. No disrespect intended, but if the gentleman is dead, then he is no longer the oldest man in the United States.

It reminds us once again that the English language is a very harsh taskmaster. I know they used this caption because until he died he represented the oldest man, but that’s no longer the case.

Teaching With Online Games - Dec. 11th

This seems like an ambitious topic to cover in only one hour, but I guess for free you can't go wrong. Elluminate is hosting this presentation By Dr. David Gibson of the University of Vermont.

Can a game or simulation teach a teacher? Can it improve one's knowledge and skill as an instructor? As part of an international dialog between researchers in educational technology, this key question and many more related to it have led to this new collection of ideas, research and reflections by researchers looking for answers.This session is intended for a broad audience of anyone who is looking into games and simulations with an eye to their potential for improving teaching and learning. If this is you, then welcome to an emerging community!

Elluminate - Where Bright Ideas Meet

Going Too Far with Online Interactivity?

Okay, I'm for making learning more interactive as much as the next person, but I think this proposal in an otherwise interesting post by Dr. Trent Batson in Campus Technology - Tipping Point for "Content"--Dynamic Interaction, Not Static Stuff - is taking immersion a little too far.

Or a class discussion carried on in a chat room (while in a real classroom) so students can interact with each other as much as with the teacher.

Why would anyone want to have learners who are gathered together in a real classroom carry on their discussion through an online chat room? I have a difficult time getting around the vision of a room full of learners all studiously clicking away at their i-Phones, laptops, etc. without a word being said.

About the only value that I can see from this exercise is that it creates a record of the conversations through the chat room log. If that's what a teacher wants then just buy a digital tape recorder.

Learning "Webinoshes"

Will Thalheimer's newsletter announced the following two Webinoshes

Upcoming Schedule:

Friday November 7th, Noon U.S. East Coast Time Can We Improve Our Smile Sheets? Link to Register: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/345686876

Friday November 21st, Noon U.S. East Coast Time Does Context Matter? Link to Register: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/796752726

Available through both the phone and VOIP so folks from around the world can attend.

Will describes his webinoshes as "short, intimate webinars covering one essential topic in human learning and performance. I add questions, learning myths, and question-and-answer sessions (where you can ask me anything) to the mix to keep things interesting. These Brown Bag Learning experiences are provided using a "Subscription Learning" methodology, so that themes will be repeated over time for deeper, more impactful learning.

Chrome's impact on Web-based Learning

With Google's release of Chrome, it's new browser, one has to wonder what impact it will have on the web-based learning development community. For those of us who create courseware for the corporate world we have long used Microsoft's Internet Explorer as the standard by which we measure the functionality of our output.

Part of this is because the corporate world has viewed Microsoft and its products, the software equivalent of General Motors. And to paraphrase the old saying, "What's good for Microsoft is good for the country." (In fairness, it appears that saying was a mis-characterization of what Charles Wilson, then CEO of GM actually said. ) Internet Explorer is so intertwined with the Window's operating system that it has become defacto corporate browser of choice.

But can this corporate mindset stand much longer. Mozilla Firefox is slowly cutting into IE's overall hold as the world's preferred browser. In the past eight months IE's percentage of the browser market has decreased over 6 percent, although it still controls a large 73% market share. It will definitely take a more secure release before Chrome can even be considered by the corporate world. But the overall concept is intriguing because it is taking Microsoft's approach to grabbing the lion's share of the browser market but in reverse. By bundling it with Google Gears, it has made it easy to use Google's online office application tools including setting up desktop icons to access Google Docs, Google Gmail, etc.

Time will tell whether Chrome becomes a hit or miss, but my gut feeling is that it will find its niche market in the small and medium corporate world. Google already bundles secure solutions with its other main services and Chrome could become the icing on the cake. Even if Chrome does not catch on, the publicity will make people start to reconsider IE and we, as an industry, will no longer be able to rely on IE as the sole yardstick for usability.

del.icio.us Tags: browsers,Microsoft,Google

Sunday Morning Respite

I’d never heard of Webb Wilder until today. Wikipedia describes him as "a musician who famously mixes the sounds of country, surf guitar and rock & roll known as "swampedelic". He also produced an award-winning collection of short films under the title of Corn Flicks." Below are two videos that Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds displayed on his blog this weekend.

The first is a 1989 music video that cpatures Webb's musical stylings.

The second video is a short that provides a taste of his "Corn Flicks" films.

Does it have anything to do with learning, training, or education? Nahh, but it is certainly fun to watch and listen to.