Social Learning – Business – eLearning Hot List

Jun 23, 2009 (3 days ago)

Google Wave – Social Learning – Business – eLearning Hot List

from eLearning Technology by Tony Karrer

eLearning Learning Hot List

June 12, 2009 to June 19, 2009

Top Posts

The following are the top posts from featured sources based on social signals.

1. Business of Learning- eLearning Technology, June 15, 2009
2. New online book on mobile learning -available for free download- Ignatia Webs, June 12, 2009
3. Phases of the 3PD Approach: Discovering Instructional Design 15- The E-Learning Curve, June 16, 2009
4. Google Wave as a Learning Tool- Learning and Technology, June 12, 2009
5. Student Guide: Introduction to ‘Wikis’ in Blackboard- Don't Waste Your Time, June 12, 2009
6. Captivate Widgets Tutorial: Create your first Widget- Adobe Captivate Blog, June 19, 2009
7. Discovering Instructional Design 14: the Three-Phase Design Model- The E-Learning Curve, June 15, 2009
8. How Big is Moodle?- MinuteBio, June 12, 2009
9. 3PD Approaches to Evaluation: Discovering Instructional Design 16- The E-Learning Curve, June 19, 2009
10. Nintendo’s Four I Standard- Upside Learning Blog, June 19, 2009
11. Call for Panelists - Future of Business of Learning- eLearning Technology, June 18, 2009
12. New Lynda.com tutorial on Captivate 4- Adobe Captivate Blog, June 18, 2009
13. Top 100 Educators to follow on Twitter- Don't Waste Your Time, June 18, 2009
14. New Networked Organisation- ThirdForce Blog, June 17, 2009
15. The Tipping Point - Are You There Yet?- Engaged Learning, June 16, 2009
16. Opera Unite for Windows/Mac/Linux gives you immediate access to group or personal learning spaces-Ignatia Webs, June 16, 2009
17. #eden09: educational shift in Japan, using ubiquitous learning by Haruo Nishinosono- Ignatia Webs, June 15, 2009
18. Is it ever okay to have multiple tweeters for one twOrganization?- Business Casual, June 14, 2009
19. Brain rule #12- Clive on Learning, June 12, 2009

Top Other Items

The following are the top other items based on social signals.

1. Eight Myths About Video Games Debunked, June 17, 2009
2. Here’s Why You Need an E-Learning Portfolio, June 16, 2009
3. Game Studies 0102: Cultural framing of computer/video games. By Kurt Squire, June 17, 2009
4. Interesting Web Sites for Game-Based Training, e-Learning and Education:, June 17, 2009
5. 10 Strategies for Integrating Learning and Work (part 1), June 15, 2009
6. What is a Game? The Art of Computer Game Design, June 17, 2009
7. The Top 5 Platforms for Creating Educational Video Games « Educational Games Research, June 17, 2009
8. Why Do People Play Games? - The Art of Computer Game Design, June 17, 2009
9. Social Network Analysis: An introduction, June 12, 2009
10. Rapid (Collaborative) Authoring Tools for developers/SMEs in multiple locations, June 17, 2009
11. U.S. Spies Use Custom Videogames to Learn How to Think, June 17, 2009
12. Marc Prensky - Twitch Speed, June 17, 2009
13. Business Impact of Social and Informal Learning, June 12, 2009
14. Fourteen Forms of Fun, June 17, 2009
15. Gamasutra - Features - "Natural Funativity", June 17, 2009
16. Integrating Learning and Work, June 16, 2009
17. Why group norms kill creativity, June 14, 2009
18. The Ideal Computer for Camtasia Studio, June 17, 2009
19. Examples from TWITCHSPEED.COM Digital Game-Based Learning, June 17, 2009
20. Twitter Search in Plain English, June 17, 2009

Informal Learning Flow

by Tony Karrer

I've always been a big believer in the value and power of informal learning. Over the past few years, I've written quite a few posts about informal learning.

• Informal Learning - Let's Get Real
• Informal Learning - Let's Get Real - Part II
• Elves, Measuring Results and Informal Learning
• Formalizing and Investing in Informal Learning
• Numbers and Informal Learning
• The Real Challenge around Informal Learning
• More on the Form of Informal

The challenge for me has always been the The Paradox of Informal Learning (Form of Informal?) - it's defining systems for informal learning that effectively support learners. In many ways, eLearning 2.0 is one part of systematizing support for informal learning. I just saw that Josh Bersin wrote about this issue.

The person I most associate with informal learning is Jay Cross. And I'm happy to announce that he's working with me to help bring together resources via the Informal Learning Flow.

You can find his announcement here. Jay tells us ...

For the past couple of days, I’ve been consuming knowledge from a site that better fits how I learn.Called Informal Learning Flow, the site pulls together the feeds of the people I read and topics that I care about. You’ve got to see this in action to understand its power. Go to the site and click on a concept, say, informal learning. Then click on another concept, say, formal learning. You’ll call up entries that use both terms. Experiment a little; there’s more going on under the hood here than meets the eye.

I'm also looking forward to seeing if this helps make sense of what I feel is a pretty amorphous topic. To me, it's interesting to go look at the Tools for Informal Learning page and look at the best posts to see what comes up. And there are some good ones -

• Innovation and Learning
• I Collect My Knowledge in My Friends: The Distributed "We"
• To Blog or Not to Blog?
• Thoughts (OK Rant) on this Month’s Big Question
• The Future of Online Learning: Ten Years On

That's a pretty good list to start from. It was also interesting to see that Tools didn't appear in the titles. I also looked at what were the top posts and terms for the first half of January.

• How to: Build a Social Media Cheat Sheet for Any Topic
• Work on Stuff that Matters: First Principles
• What Not To Build
• Participatory Media Literacy: Why it matters
• Using virtual worlds and video games to teach the lessons of reality
• Resources and Tools

Hot Keywords -

• network
  
• learning
• social
  
• customers
• future
• generation
• platforms
  
• responsibility
  
• brain
  
• corporations
  
• Google
  
• Harvard
  
• BBC
• IBM
  
• HP
  

Jay and I have had numerous conversations, debates, etc. over how to support organizations who believe in the power of informal learning but who need help making sense of getting there. I'm really looking forward to continue our conversation around this.

Browse eLearning Content at www.elearninglearning.com

12 eLearning Predictions for 2009

by Tony Karrer

Last year I laid out in January my Ten Predictions for eLearning 2008. In my post, 2008 2009 - written in December 2008, I looked at how well I did in those predictions, and my results were pretty good, not perfect. So, let's try it again this year ...

#1 - "Self-Directed Learning" Increases

Due to economic pressures, companies are going to reduce training budgets to a point where it doesn't make sense to create content on marginal topics. Instead, we will call this "self-directed learning" and will do our best to support the workforce to learn it on their own with minimal guidance and support.

#2 - eLearning 2.0 Grows - But Creating "eLearning 2.0 Strategy" Fails

One of the better, cheap support mechanisms for self-directed learning are web 2.0 tools. As such, eLearning 2.0 will show continued growth. We will especially see a rapid growth in the use of wikis for content presentation. There will also be growth in discussions and social networks for collaborative learning.

At the same time, organizations who try to create big eLearning 2.0 Strategies will move much slower than organizations who adopt easy to use tools and make tactical use of these tools.

Corollary: if you have SharePoint installed, you will be using SharePoint a lot more this year.

#3 - Increase in Consumer/Education Social Learning Solutions will Increase Pressure for Social Learning Solutions in Corporate Learning

Sorry, I couldn't figure out a shorter way to say this. 2008 was an interesting year that saw a myriad of new start-ups offering content through interesting new avenues. Social learning solutions like social homework help provided by Cramster; CampusBug, Grockit, TutorVista, EduFire, English Cafe, and the list goes on and on.

What will happen to about 20% of the workplace learning professionals is that some VP/C level in your company will have their teenager or college age kid use one of these services and tell them about it. They will they proceed to wonder why you aren't doing something similar.

It's the change where consumer leads education leads corporate.

#4 - Quick Wins & Toolkits

With the tough economy, everyone will be looking for quick wins. How can you improve performance quickly and at low cost? The answer for many organizations will be less training and more performance support in the form of toolkits. Teach me less about communication and give me more templates for important, tough communication points.

Off-the-shelf content companies will be moving to meet this need by emphasizing quick wins through resources.

#5 - Virtual Classroom Tipping Point

Based on a few different conversations and experiences, I believe that we've reached a point where virtual classroom training is no longer seen as inherently inferior and a lower value. Some training will still be preferred face to face such as when team building or in-person soft skills are important, but 2009 will be the year when we realize that we should be justifying any in-person training. Price points for virtual classroom training will begin to be virtually the same as for the same in-person classes.

Corrollary: transition to virtual means greater demand for help on effective virtual classroom training and for people who are good at creation effective remote experiences.

#6 - Greater Domination by Leading Tool Vendors - Captivate, Articulate, Lectora, Camtasia

Captivate 4 is going to be a great tool. Articulate has a great tool set. Lectora is great at packaging. Camtasia is good at screencasting. It's going to be tough for me-too tools to push out these players in the corporate market. In some settings, free authoring tools may do better, but they probably won't get much traction in workplace training.

#7 - Niche Tools Emerge and Get Traction in Niches

So the caveat to the above statement about the big players getting bigger is that I believe we will see more and more niche tools get traction. We've seen some traction by the game show type tools such as those byLearningWare. We may also see use of Flash Quiz Tools, polls, survey tools or something like Harbinger Knowledge's Team Pod. These things can create fun interactions that easily fit into a course built with one of the above tools. They also fit into a wiki page. It's also interesting to see effort's like Articulate's Community Interactions - which is essentially the ability to add specialized interactions including new types of interactions from the developer community.

#8 - More Wiki Pages - Same Authored Minutes - Less Classroom Minutes

I pretty much already said this, but I might as well mention it again. The above trends around eLearning 2.0, self-directed learning, quick wins and toolkits all suggest that more web pages - authored via wikis - will be the name of the game in 2009. The goal of lower cost will continue the transition from classroom to courseware which will keep the total number of authored minutes about the same, even with the move of content from courses to web pages.

#9 - Knowledge Worker Skills 

Topic growing rapidly, problem getting recognized, more and more people offering workshops and solutions to address this

I realized in 2007 that there's a very important Knowledge Worker Skill Gap
emerging. In 2008, I felt compelled to launch Work Literacy, and help help people and organizations upgrade skills like Leveraging Networks, Network Feedback, Finding Expertise, Using Social Media to Find Answers to Questions, Learning through Conversation and searching, scanning, etc.

2009 is going to be a big year for this issue. The fact that this is one of the general sessions at ASTD TechKnowledge is interesting way to start 2009. We are now offering a Work Literacy Skills Workshop. This is going to get more and more attention this year. Especially as employers move more towards self-directed learning.

#10 - Mobile Learning Niche Growth

Last year I said mobile learning would be well below where people were expecting. While I still think this will be a relatively small percentage of activity, this year, I expect to be a year in which mobile becomes more I believe that we will see continued increase in the percentage of people walking around with mobile web access. This will offer increased interesting opportunities such as:

• Real-time Polls - We are just beginning to see tools like Poll Everywhere that allow mobile polling. That way an audience sitting at an in-person conference will have some of the capabilities that they do online. (Did I mention the move towards virtual classroom?)
• Job aids / quick reference - about 30% of you are going to be asked to make sure your content is viewable on an iPhone.
• Podcasts / Vidcasts targeting mobile professionals (ex. sales people)
• Sales challenge scoreboard - For some mobile professionals, specific types of content such as sales challenges will be delivered through mobile solutions.
  

At the same time, the wild enthusiasm for mobile learning that was present in 2007 and died down a bit in 2008, will remain somewhat subdued. And we won't see much adoption as the central vehicle for learning content delivery.

#11 - Micro Virtual Conferences

The move towards acceptance of virtual classroom means that there will slowly begin to be acceptance of virtual conferences. Conferences this year will also do this because their other alternative is to be canceled from lack of people able to pay for travel. But because we are all going to be maxed out, expected to do 10% more work with 10% less people, we won't have time to go for several days. Instead, we will see the creation of things that are in between a full virtual conference and something that's a few sessions. These things will be more targeted and deeper. Many of them will be from ad hoc sources, such as George, Jay and myself.

#12 - Data Driven

With the economic situation, there will be greater demand for results and thus more interest in data-driven performance solutions.

Browse eLearning Content at www.elearninglearning.com

Next Generation Knowledge Sharing & Learning Online Conference Event - In Spring 2008?

Luis Suarez (KM Specialist, IBM) Posted 12/17/2007
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While I am just about to finish editing the audio recording (And fine tune the slide deck that will go with it) from my pitch on Social Computing @ IBM at the recent IBM iForum event in Zürich, and while trying to wrap up everything at work since tomorrow is my last working day for the remaining of the year, earlier on today in Twitter a crazy thought came up from James Dellow after I mentioned in one of my twitterings how one of my abstracts for a conference event, taking place next year, on the state of social computing, was rejected. From there onwards, Dennis McDonald also jumped in, along with Steve Collins, Kelly Drahzal (a.k.a. Kellypuffs), Mark Masterson, Nancy White, LittleLaura, Ryan Boyles, Thomas van der Wal, Ryan Lanham and Jasmin Tragas so far. And before we knew it we had a whole bunch of folks in Twitter interested in the overall event (Plus those who contacted me already offline!).

Look at that!?!?! Who would have thought that Twitter would have such a huge and immediate impact where a bunch of folks passionate on a particular topic, i.e. social computing, will be gathering together into participating on an online conference event around the subject of Knowledge Sharing and Learning and the impact social software is having in both of them? Pretty amazing, don't you think?

From there onwards, we were all thinking about a potential title and theme for the conference. Nancy White came up with some really good comments on a potential direction: "I have been struggling with "what it is" And it is not just personal. It is organizational. KS, knowledge creation and application. And yes, some management" and so did LittleLaura: "like the idea of KM and IM and info architecture, importance often gets forgotten with all the hype of modern media these days!", along with Kapil Gupta with some really good suggestions: "I only saw part of your conversation about nextgen KM conf, but sounds like you need is something like a barcamp for KM -in SL maybe?"

And in just a matter of minutes things are starting to pave out quite nicely. No, we haven't finalised a title yet, nor a theme for the overall conference event. So far we have agreed it would be best to host an online event, pretty much like the rather impressive and superb eLearning Technology - Corporate Learning: Trends and Innovations that Tony Karrer, and a few other folks, helped put together not long ago and which I will also blog about in the near future (Catching up with the recordings and blog posts at this moment in time).

But before we move forward on to figuring out the next thing (Establish the final title of the conference, overall logistics, online venue, themes and speaker sessions, etc. etc.) and seeing how not many of the folks who get to read this blog or James Dellow's ChiefTech are actually hanging out in Twitter, I thought I would poll you folks over here on whether there would be any people out there interested in having such event taking place, some time during the course of 2008, perhaps in the spring. Still to be decided, indeed.

What do you think? We haven't figured out just yet either how long it would be taking, but I am sure that we could come up with some suggestions in here on the overall length of the conference, and the final format. For now, just querying the folks who get to read blogs on social computing, knowledge sharing and learning topics, plus anyone else interested in the subject. What do you think? Feel you would be able to find some time during spring next year to participate in such an event? Rather as a speaker in whatever the three fields (Or, whatever other you would feel would be relevant for the current trend of discussions held thus far), or as an active participant? Either way would work for us.

Well, here is your chance to weigh in. Share with us below, as a comment, or contact me offline, whether you would want that event to take place or not, whether you would want to participate as an speaker or not, whether you may be able to help volunteer some time to help out with the logistics and whatever else. Like I said, this initial blog post is a little bit to touch base on exploring the potential of hosting such online event to help shape how social computing is impacting Knowledge Sharing / Knowledge Management and Learning in the corporate world.

Thus go ahead and share those comments with us! A simple Yes / No would do as well. No need to elaborate much more right now, if you wish to. Just getting a sense on whether it would be worth while pursuing or not... What do you feel? Fancy joining us altogether to shape the way we are embracing social software within the corporate world to dramatically change the way we share our knowledge, learn and collaborate with other knowledge workers?

Best elearning Blog

Dec 11, 2007 Best eLearning Blog from eLearning Technology by Tony Karrer The winners of the Edublog awards were announced and I'm happy to report that this blog won for Best eLearning / Corporate Education. I want to thank each of you who voted in support of this blog. Sincerely, thank you! They've offered an opportunity to submit an "acceptance" but honestly, I'm a bit at a loss on what I should put in an acceptance. I definitely want to thank everyone who I've had conversations with over the past two years while writing this blog. The conversations have been the value for me and it's been tremendous. I'd start to name names, but I'd be worried that I would leave people out. And it would take me a few hours to go through and find all the names. Should I just suck it up and do that? Or is there another way to do it? Do you think people would feel slighted if I happen to miss them? Is that worth the risk? And other than thanking everyone, what else would I put in an acceptance? Anyone? Please help. Update: I just saw a post by Clive Shepherd - Edublog Award Winners. He's actually done a nice job on this that I may essentially rip off... Now, I'm sure no-one starts blogging in order to win awards, although the appreciation of one's peers is always welcome. Looking at other measures of success, I'm probably financially a little worse off after devoting so much time to this blog over the past two years. Luckily there are benefits that far outweigh the costs, not least many new friends in the blogosphere and a hugely enriched understanding of the professional field in which I work. For this reason, I would recommend any other learning and development professionals out there with a story to tell and a willingness to share perspectives with your peer group to take the plunge and join us. I may skip the financially worse off part. :)