Workplace Learning Today

Lee Wright of Plateau Systems describes well the challenges of managing e-learning content, including:

O  Very large content libraries that may or may not be well used.

O  Differences in standards, operating systems, browsers, and devices.

O  The heaviness of some video or simulation content.

O  The effort of publishing and updating content to the LMS.

O  Custom content developed internally by SMEs in various tools.

Content-as-a-Service (Plateau’s is called iContent) is a service designed to solve these problems. (TW)

Online Content: Still a Pain In the SaaS | July 2010

Meet Evan Frendo, a freelance trainer, teacher trainer and author who has been involved in teaching English for the workplace since 1993. He has a valuable blog that is a resource for teachers and trainers of business English and “English for Specific Purposes” (ESP) – a new term for me. I’ll let Evan explain:

What I would like to do is provide a forum for those of us who work with people who actually need English to make their intercultural workplace communication more effective and more efficient. I often feel that our industry, and here I am talking not only about teachers but also about publishers / testers / schools etc, tends to lump such learners in together with pre-experience learners, providing books, exams and courses where one size fits all, even though the needs are often so different. How can the needs of a middle-aged sales engineer be anything like those of a twenty-one year old who is still at university? Why does grammar teaching still play such an important role, when what we should be talking about is teaching meaning? How can we train business English teachers (and schools) to really analyse the corporate perspective on what language training is all about, instead of simply paying lip service to the whole process of needs analysis? I think our job is to minimize misunderstanding in intercultural communication, so that people can do their work, but I am not sure this is really where the focus is.

If this is your interest, check out Evan’s helpful blog by clicking here. (GW)

“Clinging to outdated teaching practices amounts to educational malpractice,” says Harvard professor Chris Dede. Just as doctors have a responsibility to learn new medical techniques throughout their careers, educators have a responsibility to become acquainted with and employ new learning techniques and technologies.

This article provides three tips to help convince traditional stand-up lecturers to adopt new methods and tools.

Focus on the Non-Techies “The least-wired faculty members make the best advocates for high-tech teaching.” Watch Your Language “…seminars with titles like “5 Ways to Use a Wiki in Your Class” or “Getting Started With Blackboard” [too] often … stress the technology more than its goals.” Look to Disciplines Scholarly disciplines, rather than colleges, may become the best drivers of teaching reform, then, because scholars already turn to disciplinary organizations and journals to keep up with research. Good stuff. (RN)

Reaching the Last Technology Holdouts at the Front of the Classroom | Chronicle of Higher Education | Jeffrey R. Young | 24 July 2010

Tom Kuhlmann describes how e-learning developers get help with projects in communities, such as the Articulate Community Forums.

He includes a nice sample tutorial, on creating a 3-D effect in PowerPoint, contributed by a community member.

The bottom line is that you should be in the community forums for the e-learning tools you use. (TW)

Here’s Where the E-Learning Community Provides Practical Value | July 27th, 2010

California State University professor Jeffrey R. Bell and University of Central Oklahoma professor Jim Bidlack entered scientific terms such as “mitosis” into video search engines and “analyzed the top 20 results from each one to compare their relevance and educational usefulness.”

Google Video returned the most high-quality videos in the top 20 search results, the professors said. (Google owns YouTube but also operates Google Video, which includes videos across the Web rather than just those on YouTube, which hosts videos from users.)

If you’re like most people, you likely turn to YouTube for most video needs. Google Video, however, may be a better source of learning content. (RN)

YouTube Better at Funny Cat Videos Than Educational Content, Professors Say | The Chronicle of Higher Education | Jeff Young | 26 July 2010

If we are to move beyond the learning and knowledge of individuals to some kind of collective intelligence, we will need technologies to gather and aggregate many views and display them for all to see. An infographic video that shows the changing mood of the US population throughout the day is a hint of what such tools might look and act like. The mood of the nation is inferred by the occurence of keywords in the Twitter stream. Alan Mislove, a computer scientist at Northeastern University, used 300 million tweets in real time to produce this video.

Mislove and his team started with a scale, previously devised by psychologists via polling, which assigns mood scores to 600 English words.
Mislove then used that scale to analyze 300 million tweets that originated in America, from 2006-2009. And he was then able to create a collective mood score for each state.

Take a look. (GW)

Infographic of the Day: Twitter Tracks the Entire Country’s Mood | Fast Company | Cliff Kuang | 23 July 2010

Nice interactive article by the Innovative Learning Group showing how informal learning tools (as opposed to classroom training or traditional e-learning) can be used for compliance training.

Very good information and a clever design. (TW)

Using Informal Learning for Compliance Training | July 2010

MyCustomer.com interviewed author and futurist Ross Dawson on the development of tools for crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is using groups of people to solve difficult problems. It is now becoming popular. The post says:

…suddenly crowdsourcing seems to be reaching some kind of critical mass. From reports that Microsoft crowdsourced the making of Office 2010, to David Cameron asking the UK’s civil servants for money-saving ideas via the Government’s Spending Challenge, it’s not just that interest in it is peaking, it’s that organisations are already bringing crowdsourcing plans to fruition.

Ross Dawson categorizes this genre of technologies as follows:

• Distributed innovation platforms
• Idea platforms
• Innovation prizes
• Content markets
• Prediction markets
• Competition platforms

Each of these types of crowdsourcing are explained in this long post, with lots of examples of software to support each type. Well worth reading. (GW)

Ross Dawson: Six tools to kickstart your crowdsourcing strategy | Neil Davey | MyCustomer.com | 1 July 2010

As I’ve written in the past, MakeUseOf is a great site to discover new tools and technologies. This morning, I discovered PearlTrees, a visual and social bookmarking tool. MakeUseOf describes the tool as follows:

• Cool visual bookmarking tool for storing, sharing and organizing web content
• User friendly interface.
• The buttons placed on the address bar let you add new nodes / ‘pearls’ and visit your pearltree.
• Hovering your mouse over a pearl shows its preview in a small window.
• You can rearrange pearls for better organization.
• Can be very helpful in gathering content for research.

Think of it as mindmaps for bookmarking. Below is a video. (RN)

PearlTrees: Store, Share & Organize Web Content Visually | MakeUseOf | 27 July 2010

It seems like every day brings a new amazing app.

Here’s Bump 2.0, a free app for the iPhone.

You can tap phones with another Bump user to become friends on Facebook, share files, and compare calendars.

Here’s a video:

(TW)

Now You Can Bump iPhones to Connect on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn | 26 July 2010

We’ve written here in the past about the dramatic changes taking place in the job front. Fifty years ago, you might have been employed with one organization for life. Now, salaried positions are quickly being replaced with part-time, contractual positions. As Marshall Goldsmith says in his latest book, Mojo, in referring to the type of employment people experienced in the past, “that job is gone.”

This case study describes the talent acquisition and management practices of Pop Sandbox, a Toronto-based multimedia production and publishing company.

Like many businesses run by creative professionals, Pop Sandbox is project-based. The projects require an increasingly diverse and specialized collection of skills, but [the company] can’t hire full-time staff because the requirements of each client are different.

Finding talent:

If someone seems promising, but you’re unsure about them, [the company] suggests working together on a smaller project or giving them a reduced role initially, to learn more about their working style and the quality of what they produce.

Convincing the talented individuals to work on the project:

Everyone is motivated by financial considerations, but creative professionals also pay close attention to the work itself and value the chance to grow and diversify their skills. They also consider what the project deliverable will mean for their career.

Convincing talented individuals to work with the company again in the future:

…people need to trust you. They need to trust your honesty and integrity, but they also need to trust your capabilities and judgments. The people you want to work with aren’t those looking to make a quick buck, they’re the people who want to nurture a long-term relationship with you.

At Brandon Hall Research, we’ve had good and bad experiences in these types of situations.  I’d add the following recommendations: when you find someone great, try to keep them busy, even if it’s just a few hours per week of regular, part-time work. Also, try to uncover whether they have additional skills that may make them suited to working on different types of project. People with great skills are valuable. People with great skills in multiple areas who can wear many hats are superstars, especially in small- and medium-sized businesses .

How to attract talent without hiring full-time | The Globe and Mail | Becky Reuber | 23 July 2010

A couple of weeks ago I heard a fascinating interview with a robot named Bina48 on the radio. It almost sounded like a human to human conversation, but you also knew from her answers that Bina48 was not a human. Still, it showed that conversational robots have come a long way, and will likely get better over the next few years. You can judge for yourself. Here is a video of another interview of Bina48 by a New York Times reporter.

What do you think? (GW)

Jeanne Meister and Karie Willyerd of Future Workplace make ten predictions about learning in the next decade.

All make perfect sense.

Some are rushing at us (apps, mobile learning), some are unfolding at a steady pace (games and simulations, peer-to-peer learning), and some are logical bets (government-sponsored savings accounts for retraining).

Most fun to think about: You will be rated publicly, like Amazon or Yelp today.

Biggest change for the learning function: The learning function’s role will shift from learning to accreditation.

(TW)

Looking Ahead at Social Learning: 10 Predictions | July 2010

Our educational system has alway emphasized individual achievements over group work when it comes to assessment and learning. This is a problem for collaborative approaches to education and training, where the work produced is an outcome of the efforts and ideas of many different people. But, that is one of the directions where learning is going (another is DIY – do it yourself learning).

Researchers at MIT have produced the Neverending Drawing Machine (above), an art tool that Kit Eaton of Fast Company describes as a “collaborative real-time content-sharing and creativity system that lets users create novel digital artworks together.” There is a brief video in her post that shows the tool in action.

The Never-Ending Drawing Machine from isabelle rousset on Vimeo.

MIT’s Neverending Drawing Machine Hints at the Future of Education | Fast Company | Kit Eaton | 12 July 2010

India is looking for a company to produce and bring to market a new tablet device that would be priced at around $35; 1/14th the price of an iPad.

If the government can find a manufacturer, the Linux operating system-based computer would be the latest in a string of “world’s cheapest” innovations to hit the market out of India, which is home to the $2,100 compact Nano car, the $16 water purifier and the $2,000 open-heart surgery.

The cost of computer hardware usually drops gradually. This is like a leap off a cliff. (RN)

India’s iPad rival to cost $35 | The Globe and Mail | Erika Kinetz | 23 July 2010

Nice description of Autodesk (with the help of Intrepid Learning Solutions) migrating product training for a thousand salespeople and engineers to virtual instructor-led training.

Something you can use immediately in your next webinar or virtual class is the composition of their “crew” for each session:

O  Presenter.

O  Producer, who handled the logistics of each event, such as loading files, running rehearsals, and keeping on schedule.

O  Host, who introduced the session, reviewed tools, and did the wrap-up.

O  Moderator, who answered learners’ questions and solved or dealt with technical issues.

(TW)

Virtual Instructor-Led Training: Powerful, Not PowerPoint | July 2010

According to Matt Jones, in interacting with computer screens, there are two basic choices – either falling into a deep “attention well” or to use computers and mobile phones as supplemental devices to the business of people living in the world. In the first case we are isolated in our own sensory experiences, in the second we interact with each other with the electronic media being a catalyst.  For example using the Apple iPad as surface for a board game between two people is a much more social experience than playing an online game where you have no real sense of the human qualities of the person(s) you are playing against.

This is a provocative post that will stimulate new thoughts. (GW)

Magic Tables, Not Magic Windows | Berg Blog | Matt Jones | 17 June 2010

The econmist recently published a column suggesting that blogging is dying. The Guardian’s Cory Doctory disagrees. He believes that just as television didn’t replace stage plays, Twitter, Facebook, and other avenues will not replace blogging.

When blogging was the easiest, most prominent way to produce short, informal, thinking-aloud pieces for the net, we all blogged. Now that we have Twitter, social media platforms and all the other tools that continue to emerge, many of us are finding that the material we used to save for our blogs has a better home somewhere else.

I’m a huge believer in blogging as a learning tool, especially when using a “filter blog” model such as we use for Workplace Learning Today. Spending 30- to 60-minutes per day browsing developments in a specific subject, summarizing those developments, and analyzing the impact of those developments, is a great way to keep up to date. In no time, you have built a large repository of information that can quickly be searched.  Lastly, tools now exist that allow you to write a post and quickly publish it to dozens of sites at the press of a button; making it easier to spread your learning content to others.

Reports of blogging’s death have been greatly exaggerated | The Guardian | Cory Doctorow | 13 July 2010

Flipboard is a free iPad app that makes a magazine out of your social-network news and other interests.

Amazing… You can see how great that would be for learning…

Here’s a video from the Wall Street Journal:

(TW)

Your Own Digital Magazine | 21 July 2010

Most U.S. Universities are expanding the number of courses they offer students online. Rather than developing these courses in-house, many, including Northeastern University, George Washington University, Boston University, and the University of Southern California, are turning to outside custom courseware development firms for their content authoring.

Shameless plug: I wonder if the 150+ custom content developers featured in our research are aware of this opportunity? (RN)

Outsourced Ed: Colleges Hire Companies to Build Their Online Courses | The Chronicle of Higher Education | Marc Parry | 18 July 2010