This great little video from SimplyZesty, an agency specialising in Online PR and Social Media based in Dublin, contains some fascinating stats about social media usage in the UK. Check the website out because they have a free e-book too.
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The secret of a good debate is to choose a motion controversial enough to attract along a sizeable audience, but with enough subtleties and ambiguities that top quality speakers can explore without resort to dogmatism or play acting. After last year’s clasically contentious “This house believes that the e-learning of today is essential for the important skills of tomorrow" (90 for, 144 against), it was always going to be hard for Epic, the organisers of The E-Learning Debate, to come up with something to grab the imagination as readily, particularly now that several hundred of us have been able to experience the novelty of a debate in the Oxford Union. So, how about this? ”This house believes that technology-based informal learning is more style than substance." The E-Learning Debate 2010 will take place at 4pm on October 6th. A prestigious speaker list includes informal learning guru Jay Cross (speaking against), author and academic Dr Alison Rossett (speaking for) and, just announced, Professor William Dutton of the Oxford Internet Institute. Some of the arguments are predictable: - Most of what we learn is learned informally.
- Much of our work and ...
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A recent posting on Mashable reports some interesting data from Resolve Market Research based on an online survey of potential purchasers and active users of iPads, smart phones, e-readers and portable video game devices in the USA. It provides some insights into the uses early adopters are finding for their iPads and the effect this is having on competitive devices: The iPad was initially positioned as a device for reading, watching videos and web browsing. Only 28% of prospective purchasers said their main use would be playing games. However, having got hold of the iPad, 38% then said they no longer intended to buy a portable gaming device. True, even more (49%) said they would no longer be buying an e-book reader, but that was only to be expected. Owning an iPad had a much lower impact on people’s intentions to go on and buy a netbook (32%) or MP3 player (29%). Surprising was that, for 37% of respondents, the iPad was their first Apple purchase. When you consider the ubiquity of the iPod and the number of iPhone and MacBook users out there, this is providing Apple with a host of new potential customers for their other products. The early adopters of the iPad are young ...
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Recently I got an email from 'Sean, a fellow learning theory/tool fiend... I'm also a first year student at Harvard Medical School but I just launched my own tech-heavy learning project on the side. It's called Excel Everest (http://www.ExcelEverest.com), and it's a fully interactive "book" about Microsoft Excel, but written in an Excel file. It has 41 topics, 155 exercises, 339 buttons, and 87 embedded videos.' There's a great introductory video on YouTube. Well I tried it and it's a wonderful resource. Learning Excel within Excel is a great idea that works; you get to try out all sorts of fancy formulae and formatting right inside the tool - not by simulation but for real. Not only that, it's written in clear, friendly English with a heavy dose of humour. And did I mention that it's also challenging? Not patronisingly easy like so much IT training. This would get my vote for a e-learning design award. If you're an IT trainer, get this and sit back while it does the job for you.
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In his posting Depressing study of L&D, Donald Clark quotes research by Coleman and Parkes in Spring of this year, which involved interviews with 100 key decision-makers at major UK companies. Apparently this showed that: - 70% see inadequate staff skills as a barrier to growth.
- 40% see a risk of employee skills being obsolete.
- 55% claim that l&d are failing to deliver necessary training.
- 46% doubt that l&d can deliver.
- Less than 18% agree that l&d is aligned with business
Now I haven't seen this research in any detail, so I don't know how objective these results really are. But let's suppose they're true and my instinct tells me that they probably are. I'd be inclined to point the finger of blame (not a nice thing to do but hey) at the key decision-makers themselves: -
What on earth are you doing tolerating such poor performance (at least as you perceive it)? -
Would you sit back and do nothing if other departments performed so poorly? -
What direction have you been giving to your l&d team? -
On what basis did you appoint your l&d manager? -
How much do you understand about the process of ...
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A recent article in The Economist, The evolving blogosphere, clarified for me how blogs have changed over the past five years and where they now sit amongst the panoply of social media applications. Not so long ago it was thought, almost assumed, that everyone would ultimately run their own blog - it was just a question of time before we all found something to say, gathered up the courage and started spouting off our opinions to those two billion or so internet users out there. It hasn't happened, and for several very good reasons: - Early adoption of blogs was dominated by simple status updates, published for the benefit of friends and family. This functionality is just as popular now and even more widespread but has shifted almost entirely to social networking sites such as Facebook and microblogging sites like Twitter.
- Those who wanted to express themselves in more depth on a topic soon discovered that (a) this was hard work requiring a fair amount of commitment, and that (b) you will be in competition for readers with many others around the world who may have more to say and more eloquent ways of saying it than you.
Blogging is a specialist form of ...
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It's fashionable to sneer at the idea that a particular technology is merely a solution looking desperately for a problem to justify its existence. But I'm not so sure that a rational process always has to start with a problem and move dispassionately to a solution - the process is more dynamic and interactive than that. At the eLearning Network's Showcase last week, I had time to reflect on a number of technologies that were under discussion - the iPad, interactive PDFs (if you haven't spotted these, then these are next generation Acrobat documents that can incorporate interactive multimedia elements) and good old Second Life. The advocates of each of these could be accused of hunting for problems to solve in the world of learning technologies. As I contemplated these three technologies, I scanned all those problems currently and historically faced by any of my colleagues and clients to see whether I could find an application. Essentially, I had a bunch of solutions and I was looking for problems. You do not have to wait until you have a new problem to solve and then sift through each of the currently available technologies to find the most appropriate solution. What about all . ...
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I finally got round to reading David Wilkins lengthy and emotive post A Defense of the LMS on his Social Enterprise Blog. What struck me was not his arguments for the continuing use of the learning management system in an increasingly social media age, but his apparent desperation to get this viewpoint taken seriously when it so obviously conflicts with the current fashionable viewpoint, i.e. that LMSs have had their day, largely because top down, formal learning is soon to be obsolete. Where I sympathise with David is that popular opinion (by which I mean among commentators on l&d, not actual practitioners) is so black and white, so polarised: what's new and fashionable doesn't just build on current practice it completely invalidates it; everything we do currently is the work of misguided dummies who have their heads firmly planted in the sand. So, we are supposed to believe that formal learning is always wrong and informal learning always right; similarly for face-to-face v online, top-down v bottom-up, discovery learning v structured instruction, training v performance support, passive v interactive content, 2D v 3D, static v animated and so on. Any practitioner who has ...
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I suspect that many of us find it hard to concentrate when we really need to put in a sustained effort to prepare a report or a presentation, read a document, write a script, create or edit media assets, generate code or assemble an e-learning module - in fact, all the things that e-learning people do most of the time. These tasks require single-minded concentration, sometimes over many hours, even days. How unfortunate, then, that in those times when we are less busy, we choose to install a whole load of apps that focus almost entirely on interrupting us - email, Twitter, Facebook et al. I was amused, therefore, to read in The Economist (Stay on target, June 10) that it is now possible to buy software to protect you from other bits of software: "Some programs fill the whole screen to keep disturbing alerts hidden; others disable specific websites, such as Facebook, or even cut off internet access altogether. The idea is similar to parental-control programs that prevent children from accessing inappropriate content: but these are controls that grown-up users deliberately impose upon themselves." Examples include Freedom, Isolator and Think. As an example, Freedom cuts off ...
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The Big Question for July on the ASTD Learning Circuits Blog is “Does the discussion of ‘how the brain learns’ impact your elearning design?” To emphasise the extent of this discussion, Tony Karrer lists 32 blog postings, including two of mine: Brain rules – where does that leave us?, June 22, 2009 The art of changing the brain, May 13, 2008 The answer in my case is a quite simple ‘yes’. I have gained a great deal of benefit from what I have read on this subject and I have made every effort to integrate this into any design work I have undertaken over the past couple of years. The answer for the design community as a whole should also be ‘yes’, because this stuff has relevant and practical application, but I rather suspect that a great many designers take little time to get themselves up-to-date in their own professional discipline and are still working on the basis of the old instructional design theories from the 1950s. Neuroscience hasn’t caused a complete rewrite of learning psychology, because in many cases it has only confirmed existing good practice. What this new focus on objective and relatively unbiased research has done is to (1) help us to recognise the pop ...
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