Buzzin’ on the Biz for 5/12 - 5/16/08 May 19, 2008
Posted by cjescribano in Learning, blogging, training industry.add a comment
Buzz
Buzz in the Professional Organizations
- ASTD Learning Circuits: May’s Big Question: Do we have to design, develop, and deliver instruction differently for Digital Natives?
- E-Learning Guild: Reminder to members to update survey responses on the Guild’s Web sites. (not updated since end of March.)
- ELearn Magazine: An interview on designing learning with Irene McAra-McWilliam, who specializes in cultural research for social innovation, creativity, new technology, and community and who is a pioneer in the field of interaction design. She talks about “transformation design,” differences in teaching certain subjects online and in the classroom, the use of imagining a person in online course design, the educational equivalent of fast food, the choreography of learning, and the value of face-to-face interaction in education.
- Training and Development Blog: Asks readers to think about how well they listen. Are they really hearing what the other person is saying?
- The MASIE Center: Masie is conducting a real-time blogging experiment using Twitter to capture his notes from a Harvard Kennedy School event on Presidential Leadership Competencies.
Also, a post last week talked about NBC’s new group called NBC Learn, which has launched a new product called NBC iCUE, which “takes ‘e-Learning’ a huge step forward, with the introduction of small video chunks (from the NBC News archives), social networking and gaming. They blend these learning and engagement components in new ways, which will form the basis of new pedagogical approaches.” - Training Day: Discusses how to prepare your business and your employees to function successfully in the global marketplace.
- Educause: A long list of podcasts and reading related to the use of technology in higher education, including IT issues in higher education, Web 2.0 and knowledge, communities, and cyberinfrastructure and the humanities.
Bytes
Research on Feedback: Will Thalheimer has just completed an extensive review of research and data on providing learners with feedback. You can download his free report.
New White Paper: Mobile Devices: This is part of a white paper on mobile learning. This part covers technologies, devices, and networks. The part on designing for mobile devices was included in the E-Learning Guild’s report on mobile learning.
Working Memory Down from 5 - 9 to 3 - 4: This post references a study conducted at the University of Missouri and reported in the April Proceedings of the National Institutes of Health that shows that our working memory struggles when handling more than about 3 or 4 items at a time (unlike the 7 +/- 2 that has been the rule to date).
Mobile in 5 Paragraphs: Clark Quinn provides a quick overview of mobile learning: what it is, what kinds of devices there are, developing content for, and how it enables learning. There are also links to the ELearning Guild’s report on mobile learning and other resources.
Buzzin’ on the Biz for 4/28 - 5/2 May 1, 2008
Posted by cjescribano in Learning, training industry.1 comment so far
In the latter half of April, there was a “blog carnival” on work at learning/learning at work, which provided an area of focused conversation. Of the 15 bloggers who participated, social learning and informal learning were big topics of conversation. Here’s the breakdown of topics into some categories I created:
- Learning best practices (my own category for people with concrete suggestions on improving learning at work): 7
- Learning 2.0 (including social learning): 4
- Informal learning: 1
- Leadership and learning: 1
- Learning sources: 1
- How we learn: 1
Buzz in the Professional Organizations
- ASTD Learning Circuits: May’s Big Question: Do we have to design, develop, and deliver instruction differently for Digital Natives?
- E-Learning Guild: Reminder to members to update survey responses on the Guild’s Web sites. (not updated since end of March.)
- ELearn Magazine: 14 excellent tips for how to keep students in a distance learning class motivated.
- Training and Development Blog: In honor of May being Older Americans month, Training and Development provides statistics on how many older Americans will soon be retiring and asks readers what plans they have to capture the knowledge of exiting workers and how they will replace them.
- The MASIE Center: (No change since last time) Masie’s learnings and impressions from his Learning Systems event last week where he met with 370 learning leaders to talk about learning and LMSs/LCMSs. Also, info about an interesting learning event in Atlanta for high school students–called FIRST Robotics Co-opetition. “It involves intentional use of a game challenge, atmosphere, coaching, “gracious professionalism”, short/intense action spurts and a design/build experience. Creative use of “failure” is also leveraged in a way that could be deeply emulated within corporate learning designs.”–Intriguing! Masie will be live blogging on this event and posting video interviews.
- Training Day: Best practices in Second Life. This article says that if you’re just using Second Life for meetings/conferencing, you’re probably using the wrong tool. It also introduces a new feature in Second Life, called robotic avatars, that allow SEcond Life to be used for asynchronous e-learning. Learners interact with the robotic avatars, which seem to be real people but are not. Their completion of tasks and progress can be tracked via reports.
- Educause: Advertises a free Webinar on Digital Visual Literacy, which has become an essential skill for the 21st century college graduate; Discusses an Educause Learning Initiative on the social network, ning–7 Things You Should Know About Ning; Discusses the Senate committee meeting on the future of the Internet and network neutrality; LOTS of podcasts on topics related to technology and learning
Bytes
HR in Second Life: Provides a summary of a plenary session at the HRPS conference that talks about how companies are using Second Life for HR functions. Also provides videos that were used in that session.
Jane’s E-Learning Pick of the Day: Provides a brief writeup about a new tool or resource for e-learning. A great way to keep up with technology!
31-Day Comment Challenge: Challenges people to become better blog citizens by sharing their thoughts, ideas, and learnings on as many blogs as possible through comments.
Buzzin’ on the Biz for 4/14 - 4/18/08 April 17, 2008
Posted by cjescribano in Learning, Web 2.0, training industry.1 comment so far
The Buzz was busy as a bee this week, so this is a slightly abridged version. I didn’t have time to look through all 50 blogs I usually track. But here’s a run-down of the professional organizations. Plus some summaries of articles worth reading out there. Enjoy!
Also, a quick glance through my RSS aggregator showed a lot of references to the E-Learning Guild Annual Gathering. So, if you want to catch up on that event, plenty out there to read.
Buzz in the Professional Organizations
-
ASTD Learning Circuits: April’s Big Question: What would you like to do better as a learning professional? There are some interesting answers to this question–about interactivity, ROI, and pushing back. There’s even a post from Bulgaria.
-
E-Learning Guild: Reminder to members to update survey responses on the Guild’s Web sites. (not updated since end of March–probably busy with the AG.)
-
ELearn Magazine: Usability testing of e-learning. Interesting article that talks about why to usability test and provides tactical information about how to test.
-
Training and Development Blog: Celebrate Diversity!–article calling for companies to celebrate April as Diversity month. There’s also a good article on April 4 about problems with communicating with millenials.
-
The MASIE Center: Masie’s learnings and impressions from his Learning Systems event last week where he met with 370 learning leaders to talk about learning and LMSs/LCMSs. Also, info about an interesting learning event in Atlanta for high school students–called FIRST Robotics Co-opetition. “It involves intentional use of a game challenge, atmosphere, coaching, “gracious professionalism”, short/intense action spurts and a design/build experience. Creative use of “failure” is also leveraged in a way that could be deeply emulated within corporate learning designs.”–Intriguing! Masie will be live blogging on this event and posting video interviews.
-
Training Day: Discusses ways to relieve stress at work.
-
Educause: Several new books are featured; there’s also an interesting article about a keynote speech at the 2008 Midwest Regional Conference, in which Susan Metros talked about new IT strategies for a digital society.
Bytes
The Power of Networking
Really, really great article about a group of bloggers who met online, wrote a book together, and finally decided to meet in person. Talks about the value of having a powerful social network.
What Work-Learning Audit Reveals
Will Thalheimer, who always offers excellent analyses of what’s going on in the learning world, provides some interesting data about where learning happens for retail clerks (hint: only a small part happens in classrooms and e-learning).
Seven Habits of Highly Connected People by Stephen Downes
Really good list of habits for a socially networked world. Good snapshot of the Web 2.0 culture.
Extreme User Research
This may seem old-hat to analysis pros, but I think this article puts forth a quick and easy way to get valuable user data for a design. I especially like that he uses sticky notes to organize his data and look for patterns.
Running Virtual Groups
Jay Cross posts some lessons learned from interviews that he conducted at a company that “lives and breathes community.” Another good description of Web 2.0 culture.
Buzzin’ on the Biz for 3/31 - 4/3/08 April 4, 2008
Posted by cjescribano in Learning, training industry.4 comments
-
Design–4
-
Humor pieces–3
-
Info on Conferences/Classes–3
-
Writeups on software apps–3
-
Web 2.0–3
-
Podcasts–2
-
Second Life–2
The rest was all miscellaneous, everything from someone’s trip to Norway to a really inspirational video about what a father has done for his son who has cerebral palsy.
Buzz in the Professional Organizations
-
ASTD Learning Circuits: April’s Big Question: What would you like to do better as a learning professional?
-
E-Learning Guild: Reminder to members to update survey responses on the Guild’s Web sites.
-
ELearn Magazine: Ten Web 2.0 Things you can do in 10 minutes to be a more successful elearning professional
-
Training and Development Blog: In Ohio, dozens of staff members were ordered to change their focus from human services to human development (basically changing the mentality from “giving them a fish” to “teaching them how to fish”).
-
The MASIE Center: April Fools edition with some outrageous predictions, including a new Google product called Giggle used to search for humor, an e-learning for super-delegates, Level 9 evaluation, speed presenting, and outsourcing classroom participation.
-
Training Day: Discusses issues with labeling people as “high potential” and ask readers to think about how they know those people are really high potential and not just good at playing politics.
-
Educause: Wikis and emergent roles for teaching and learning; update on key U.S. copyright developments; how innovators can learn from Hollywood how to address resistance to change
-
HCI featured blogs: Interestingly, HCI does not seem to be featuring blogs on their home page anymore. Within each of their communities, they link to a lot of different blogs, but they do not seem to be featuring any in particular anymore.
Bytes
Search Patterns: This site has a collection of different types of search patterns with commentary on how each is useful and what each says about user behavior and the information architecture of search. And what’s really interesting is that they used Flickr to do this.
PowerPoint Accessibility: Really interesting article on PowerPoint and accessibility—deficiencies in PowerPoint with regard to accessibility and how to fix those.
Benchmarking Your Learning Culture: Jay Cross describes a free tool from Harvard Business Review with questions to help define organization’s learning culture and then compare it to benchmarks.
Project Initiation Checklist for Rapid ELearning: Links to a document with a checklist of things to consider at the beginning a rapid elearning project. The checklist includes many of the things we already do, but it goes a step further into implementation considerations, such as marketing and communications. I have put this document out on the Home Team Connection Shared Documents folder, under Rapid E-Learning.
Work/Learning Blog Carnival: A blog carnival! Different bloggers unite to talk about the same topic, in this case—“working at learning; learning at work”. Very interesting approach, and very interesting reading.
In Which I’m (Almost) Convinced of the Value of Twitter: Michele Martin of the Bamboo Project Blog talks about some exploration she’s doing into the value of using Twitter. What’s really great about this article are all the links to more information about Twitter and how people are using it.
Buzzin’ on the Biz, March 7 - 21 March 17, 2008
Posted by cjescribano in Learning, training industry.add a comment
Buzz
Once again, design topped the list of hot topics, with several posts providing tips for making learning more engaging. Tied at the top of the list were posts on useful tools.
Also hot:
-
The brain and learning
-
Social media
Buzz in the Professional Organizations
ASTD Learning Circuits: March’s Big Question: What Is the Scope of Our Responsibility as Learning Professionals? There are now a bunch of responses to this question, so check them out.
E-Learning Guild: Review of serious gaming software developed by IBM. (not updated since last time)
ELearn Magazine: How to measure success for a Web site for which the goal is personal enlightenment
Training and Development Blog: Cites a recent Novations Group study that showed that most diversity training does not include tools to reinforce the training, does not have metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of the training, and did not address any of the organization’s development or advancement practices.
The MASIE Center: 1) References a research paper conducted by Cisco that confronts myths and assumptions about how people learn and the role of media in the education process. 2) Provides a link to an article about how the CIA is using podcasts for language training. 3) Talks about how the room dynamic changes when a trainer/facilitator sits down with the class. 4) Lists features that learners have requested be included in LMSs.
Training Day: With more and more asked of workers, productivity may be increasing, but is quality suffering? How do companies measure productivity, and what metrics can help ensure quality along with quantity?
Educause: Understanding communications: a key to effective leadership; Teaching in Second Life: a report from the trenches; How Flickr embodies Web 2.0 technology
HCI featured blogs: 2008 National Human Capital Summit Blog provides blog posts for key sessions of this conference.
Bytes
Multimodal Learning Research conducted by Cisco
This research paper, commissioned by Cisco, provides current information on how people learn, and how media can facilitate learning.
Multimodal learning through media
Provides a brief overview of Cisco’s Multimodal Learning research paper, which Elliott Masie pointed out in Learning Trends.
25 Tools Every Learning Professional Should Have in their Toolbox—and All for Free
Whittled down from a list of 100 must-have tools, this is an interesting list of tools that the author says learning professionals should have.
Social Media How Much Is Too Much?
Good article that describes all the ways that Brandon Hall will use social media for their upcoming conference, but also questions whether or not it’s too much.
Nadira Hira Talks about Generation Y
Really good recap of a presentation by a Generation Y writer at Fortune magazine, with lots of links for more information on recruiting, hiring, and training Generation Y.
10 Emerging Technologies 2008
Technology Review’s list of 10 technologies that they think most likely to change the way we live.
Buzzin’ on the Biz March 6, 2008
Posted by cjescribano in Learning, Web 2.0, blogging, e-learning, social networking, training industry.2 comments
As a service to the company for which I work, I’ve been doing a biweekly summary of hot topics of conversation on learning-related blogs. It occurred to me, with a little help from Michele over at the Bamboo Project blog, that this information might be valuable to people outside my organization as well. So, here’s the first installment of Buzzin’ on the Biz for the worldwide audience.
Games and Web 2.0 as always were big topics of discussion. Also, since ASTD had just had their TechKnowledge conference, there were a number of posts about that, as well as a post about ELearning conferences in general.
-
ASTD Learning Circuits: March’s Big Question: What Is the Scope of Our Responsibility as Learning Professionals?
-
E-Learning Guild: Review of serious gaming software developed by IBM.
-
ELearn Magazine: Graduate student experiences of how they learn through blogging.
-
Training and Development Blog: Big brother is watching your Internet use.
-
The MASIE Center: Use of emerging technologies in the political campaigns; and a video about the Starbucks training shutdown.
-
Training Day: Make sure you’re not trying to solve every problem with training.
-
Educause: The value of feedback; and how people can experience the flight deck of the Space Shuttle in Second Life.
-
HCI featured blogs: So many Internet postings—does anyone work anymore?; result-Performance Management; d-Future business blog; reference to a blog with ideas about creativity, marketing, advertising, branding, interactive, social networking, web 2.0, design, democratization of the web etc.
Bytes
Check out these top-notch posts:
100 Ways your iPod can up your IQ
Need some ideas of how to use iPods for learning? Prepare to be overwhelmed with GREAT ideas!!
Welcome to Creepy Valley - Motion Portrait - 3D Facial Animation
This is absolutely amazing technology that converts a static image to an animation. The face actually follows the movement of the cursor. You can output the animation to PC, TV, Game Console, and Mobile devices.
5 Ways to Make Linear Navigation More Interesting
There’s a great slideshow here that provides 5 great tips for making learners WANT to click that Next button.
Wikiful Thinking
Talks about considerations for making wikis successful as enterprise tools.
Instructional Design Conversations
For the past month or so, there’s been an interesting discussion about whether or not people need a degree to be an instructional designer. This post adds to the discussion, but provides links to other parts of it. Really interesting!
Are Social Sites Good for Educating?
This is an old post from last fall, but provides some insight into 1) how schools are handling social networking and 2) the online and social networking usage of the 9 – 17 age group. Fascinating stuff. The link to the report in this post is wrong. Use this one instead:
http://www.nsba.org/SecondaryMenu/TLN/CreatingandConnecting.aspx
