Everyone is learning online these days. Often without calling it as such. You've probably learned to play song on guitar via Youtube or learned how to make the perfect phad thai. But when it comes to learning a profession we often have the feeling we need to enroll in classical courses costing thousands of euro's. We'll prove this wrong. The challenge The setup is pretty simple: Bram will reeducate from a musician to a front-end developer by just learning online. His (and our) goal is to land him a job in his new profession within a few months. Not with us but somewhere else. We will point out the right resources, answer questions and do some peer reviewing. For the rest he is on his own. Why we are doing this We want to emphasize how easy it is to learn online. And what great impact it can have on peoples career development. Of course online learning, peer reviewing and mentoring are all things we want to facilitate with LearningSpaces eventually. With Bram we get a chance to examine the needs from real close. LearningSpaces is about learning and sharing your knowledge. By sharing knowledge during his learning process, Bram will make his progress and acquired skills very visible to potential employers. So much opportunities in tech This morning I talked with Marja Doedens from Wowww, another local web company. She's active in de Noordelijke Online Ondernemers (Northern Online Entrepeneurs). Together they have a lot of open positions and a hard time finding a good mix of people with the right skills. If we can't find them, we'll make them And it turns out the right skills are often not acquired in college but by doing or online. That's why we're confident that once Bram is up to speed, a lot of companies will be looking for him. What will you learn? We hope to inspire many people to keep on learning and shape their own careers. And to inspire companies to create and enable their own diverse and skilled workforce of the future. To help each other succeed follow Bram on Twitter. Comment on his blogs. Are you in webdevelopment? Tell him what you think he should learn. Share places where he could apply. Also we are very interested in similar stories. We know that StormMC is reeducating a journalist to an online marketeer. Barbershop De Zwarte Raaf trained four employees without prior experience on the job. Let us know on Twitter.

As you may know we use Markdown for showing content in Chapters. In Markdown you can render basically any web content but the key is to make it easy for you. So now you can just paste a link and a preview will be rendered! Wait what? Yes you can create a preview object from a whitelisted url. For example, I want to share a news article from my favourite tech site, The Verge. I'm writing a Chapter about Mars. Before you would see this: With the new onebox functionality i write the same thing but the url is transformed like this: It renders a preview from the actual article and still links to it. You can also put in a Wikipedia article: Or a Youtube video: And also images from for example imgur.com: And many more websites are supported. For a full list go here (this can be updated later): https://gist.github.com/Marthyn/4cf2bc54a66606dbafde (if you pasted this on LearningSpaces you'd see the actual content of the gist here!) Basically we can add a preview for any website!

In general people don't like to wait. And no matter how fast we make our application there will always be something that takes time to process. But in many cases, if the user is informed, they will be more patient. Fortunately LearningSpaces is pretty fast and there is little waiting time. But sometimes transitioning between pages can take a brief moment, ie. due to slow internet or a large request to the server. So we can't prevent loading time but we can make it less boring. Show something awesome instead of a simple spinner or loading message. At least tickle the user's senses a bit while waiting. The first thing that came to mind was the isometric shape in our logo, consisting of a cube within a cube (or three times the letter "L" surrounding a cube). Perfect for our loading indicator: In this post I will explain and demonstrate how we recreated and animated our logo, and how to use it as a loading indicator in Ember.js. Isometric cubes The biggest challenge is recreating our logo using HTML and CSS. There are several ways to accomplish this but we are using the CSS transform property to create the isometric faux-3D effect (sometimes refered to as 2.5D). We need two cubes, but lets start with the first one. Create a container with three child elements for the visible cube faces (top, left and right): <div class="cube"> <span class="face top"></span> <span class="face left"></span> <span class="face right"></span> </div> Now we add the styling. Give the faces a background color and make sure they are square. Next we apply the math to create the isometric effect using the transform property. This property can take a list of transform functions but in the examples below we will only be using rotate, skew, scale and translate. Also note we use transform-origin which gives us control over the origin for the transformations. The CSS looks like this: .cube { position: absolute; top: 100px; left: 100px; } .face { transform-origin: 0 0; position: absolute; height: 100px; width: 100px; } .top { background: #f5f5f5; transform: rotate(210deg) skewX(-30deg) scaleY(0.864)); } .left { background: #ccc; transform: rotate(90deg) skewX(-30deg) scaleY(0.864)); } .right { background: #e0e0e0; transform: rotate(-30deg) skewX(-30deg) scaleY(0.864)); } Note: Don't forget to add vendor prefixes for the transform* properties if you want cross-browser support. In the demos I use SCSS and the bourbon mixin library so I don't have to worry about these prefixes. Check out the demo. I also created a demo of an alternative technique. Both techniques are shown in the demo below. Now we need a second cube so we can recreate our logo. Duplicate the cube and wrap them in a container: <div class="logo"> <div class="cube"> <span></span> <span></span> <span></span> </div> <div class="cube"> <span></span> <span></span> <span></span> </div> </div> Rotate the second cube 180 degrees and scale it to half its size: .cube:nth-child(2) { transform: rotate(180deg) scale(0.5); } Thats about it, see the result below. I also added some extra styling to render the cube as a wireframe like we have in our logo. Animation please To make the loading indicator complete we will add some animation. This can be done fairly easily with CSS by using @keyframes and animation. The @keyframes rule gives us control over the intermediate steps in an animation by defining keyframes (or waypoints). Each keyframe describes how the animated element should render at a given time during the animation sequence. The animation property lets you configure the timing and duration of the animation, as well as other details of how the animation sequence should progress. For our loading indicator we want the cubes faces to shift between 3 colors by animating the background color. To do this we create an animation named "color-shift" and add 4 keyframes: start, finish and 2 in between: @keyframes color-shift { 0%, 100% { background: #ccc; } 33% { background: #e0e0e0; } 66% { background: #f5f5f5; } } Now we can apply the animation to the cubes' faces. We configure the animation by setting its name (color-shift), duration (1.2s) and iteration count (infinite). But we don't want the cube's faces to get the same color on each keyframe. So we use animation-delay on the 2nd and 3rd face to delay the animation for these elements: .cube span { animation: color-shift 1.2s infinite; } .cube span:nth-child(2) { animation-delay: -0.8s; } .cube span:nth-child(3) { animation-delay: -0.4s; } Note: Don't forget to add vendor prefixes for @keyframes and animation* if you want cross-browser support. Like the animations but think all the isometric projection math is too much fuzz? Don't worry, you can create the same effect with inline SVG. In fact, we are now using SVG for our loading indicator in LearningSpaces. The demo below shows the HTML and the SVG aproach, both powered by the same CSS animation! The only difference with SVG is we have to animate the path's "fill" attribute instead of background color. Loading template in Ember.js The only thing left to do was getting our loading indicator to show up between page transitions in Ember.js. Fortunately Ember provides loading substates that allows you to do just that. Basicly the only thing we had to do is create a top-level template called loading and Ember takes care of the rest: <script type="text/x-handlebars" data-template-name="loading"> <h1>Loading ...</h1> </script> It's as simple as that! But like I said as the beginning of this post LearningSpaces is pretty fast, so we hardly get to see our loading indicator. Hugo wrote in his post: we find ourselves in the awkward position of complaining that our application isn't slow enough... If you have any questions, contact us on twitter!

When to use which While programming for Learning Spaces I had a lot of trouble choosing when to use .property('property to observe') or .observes('property to observe') They behave the same, as in they run whenever the property between the ' ' changes. But there's a difference and you should know that difference. Basically when you only manipulate other things you need observes and if you return something which you need later you need to use property So let's say you have a BookController with some properties. App.BookController = Ember.ObjectController.extend({ setPage: function() { var pageNumber = this.get('pageNumber'); this.set('page', this.store.find('page', pageNumber)); }.observes('pageNumber'), footNotes = function() { return this.get('page.footNotes') }.property('page'), copyright = function() { return '(c) Marthyn Olthof - Learning Spaces'; }.property(), }); setPage: function () { var pageNumber = this.get('pageNumber'); this.set('page', this.store.find('page', pageNumber)); }.observes('pageNumber'), This is a function which sets the page property, but it doesn't return anything. Therefor we can just use the observes('pageNumber'). Which runs every time the property pageNumber changes. But it's impossible to bind this to a view! footNotes = function () { return this.get('page.footNotes'); }.property('page'), Here footNotes is a property which returns the footnotes of a page. To update this property everytime the page changes and bind it to a view. We use property('page') with a binding to the property page. So everytime the page property changes the footnotes change too. Also you can now bind this to your view as such {{footNotes}} copyright = function() { return '(c) Marthyn Olthof - Learning Spaces'; }.property(), Finally we have a property which doesn't change at all. Therefor we use property() without any binding. We can bind this to a view with {{copyright}} and it will not change unless the controller is initialized again. For review, here is a table: Bind in view/Returns Value Changes .property('property to observe') Yes Yes .observes('property to observe') No Yes .property() Yes No

Employee education is one of the most important components of a successful business. Lots of corporations started changing their mentality towards employee education to more social way of learning, but some still lack behind and concentrate on a traditional way of educating its staff - old school training courses. Recently LearningSpaces had a chat with C&M Group CEO Chirag Kulkarni and we are very pleased to share his toughts about imporantance of social internal learning. Milda: Chirag, could you tell a bit more about yourself? How did you career started, and why do you have so much passion for startups and business development? "I love Business development because it gives startups and businesses hope regarding alternate channels businesses can take through partnerships" (C.Kulkarni) Chirag: I am an entrepreneur, advisor, and speaker. I started my career at a young age, by getting older I'm affiliate marketing in hopes to fly in a private jet ( I fantasied about this from a young age). From there, I got involved in various companies in different verticals. Currently, I run a company called C&M Group, which provides entrepreneurial led strategic consulting for startups to Fortune 500s. I have a strong passion for startups due to their ability to disrupt sectors and improve the lives for consumers. What is more, I love Business development because it gives startups and businesses hope regarding alternate channels businesses can take through partnerships, etc. I like strategizing how businesses can work together. M: What do you think of employee education these days? (How imporant it is for organizations success etc.) C: There are three types of learning that take place at a company. Primarily, these include professional, self, and formal learning. Although all three are extremely important, most companies give more importance to formal more traditional learning. Formal training works, but not for learning soft skills required in business. Small companies generally speaking don’t focus on employee education because they think it is expensive, and for that reason, want to save money. I’m a huge believer in founder education, which involves founders and executives spending time with employees for their personal and professional growth. In short, employee education is extremely important to an organizations success. Think of it like investing in your employees. M: If you could, what would you change in the system of internal learning within organizations? Why? C: For large fortune 500s, the internal learning system is determined by the executive team. Although it is important to have an internal learning process, it is more important to have learning that is focused on An employees needs and interests. This is a major flaw in the system that I would like to change, stardom with C&M Group. M: What are the flaws of traditional way of employee training? C: Employee training, in a traditional sense is extremely focused on getting higher degrees, or doing coursework at universities. Although these can be great options, these do not necessarily help immediate startups or businesses grow their employee pool's skill set. The new learning process should be geared towards helping employees with their own needs, and focusing on their professional and personal growth, and not just getting a generic MBA. Flaws of training are very similar in large companies. M: When did you realize it? C: This realization about corporate learning came when watching what large companies do for educational training. M: How do you imagine learning in the future? C: Learning in the future is going to (hopefully) be more self guided, and focused on what skills are lacking within an employee, and specifically, what the organization, educational entity, or other employees and executives can do to help the employee learn more. This will do 3 things; Increase the focus on learning relevant skills Decrease the cost of corporate learning for small and large companies Increase the employee investment per dollar, which can increase the retention rate of an employee.

Once upon a time when top-down management structure didn’t exist there was a company where people were working like a well oiled machine. In the companies' building the rooms were big, without any walls so people could communicate and exchange their knowledge very easily. The information was just one chat away and everyone was allowed to learn from their CEO, managers and their peers.  But suddenly, things started changing. Like a great storm top-down management tools emerged and the companies organizational behavior inevitably had to change. Everyone understood that it will save lots of time and that communication between each other will become easier than ever before. But did it actually change for the better?  These days there are so many learning management and communication tools that should make our life easier, but do they actually serve our interests?  Sometimes I catch myself thinking about how annoying it is to login to one site, for example university Blackboard, check the information there, then go to Facebook, create a group so I could discuss the material with my peers. Of course, for some of them some pieces of information might seem irrelevant, so I create a WhatsApp chat for my subgroup and finally I can start discussing about the information that I’ve found on Blackboard.  It was probably as annoying to read about this process, as it is irritating to me to make this circle of sharing knowledge every time.  And now I suddenly understood that after all of this effort I just don’t have any motivation to learn with or from my peers. This way of ‘online’ learning is extremely time consuming and stressful. Should knowledge sharing be so exhausting? The answer is: Of course NOT! What we need is a systems in which information is easy to reach, easy to share, where we can easily ask and comment, upload our files and get feedback! Whether you are in a small study group or working in a big organization, limited by the walls of your cubicle, right now 200 clicks away from asking your first question about something you found somewhere in your companies' learning management (or whatever) system.  The ‘online’ learning process shouldn't make people become exhausted and insecure. It is easy to say: "if you login here, you will find the documents, then login to the other site, for questions, and you will find our answers if your login there". But, wouldn’t it be easier to just actually do it all in one place without walls and limitations? That is why I like working with LearningSpaces. We share, there are no limits! You can be a teacher as well as a student. Just learn and let learn. Everyone is equal, you can comment and ask, upload and share useful files, pictures or videos. Just follow interesting topics, communicate, learn, take a quiz or do an assignment! It becomes easier to work with your colleagues when you know that each of them is just one click away. Let me explain why we decided to make everyones life easier by making LearningSpaces . With the help of the internet, the world became more interconnected. Information became very easy to find and now everyone has the possibility to train themselves. The problem is, we are so involved with ourselves that we forget that sometimes it is easier when we just help each other. Top-down management made us more reluctant to exchanging information and internal learning. But let's admit that it saves a lot of time and nerves when someone can help you understand the material, especially when you can find it all in one place. That is what LearningSpaces helps you with. It is a place where you can create the information you want to share or learn from your peers and colleagues. A place where you can easily find and ask for some help and interact with others. Communication becomes smooth and fun because everything is in one space (And yes there is a fun part!). Let me give you an example: you are a sales person of a software company, imagine how much easier it would be to work if you would understand some technical aspects of the product. You would not only become a better sales person because you have lots of insight but you gain basic knowledge of how your competitors product was built so you can strenghten your arguments of why the thing you offer is better than others. Learning can be pretty boring (to everyone), but believe me there is a fun part of it as well! LearningSpaces gamifies your learning process. Take a quiz, see how much you scored and get on the top of the score board! Get a virtual trophy for being a super user or follow your own learning path! And don't forget to be proud of yourself and be awesome! All in all, there is always more motivation to learning when you feel the support from your peers. Of course, you feel even more motivated when you know that you don't have to open 100 windows on your screen so you could ask one question. LearningSpaces will make your organizations internal learning process more social and fun, it won't be time consuming or difficult to understand anymore. It doesn't matter that once upon a time top-down management with its perfect order destroyed easy learning and communication in the company. What matters is that companies that understand that going back to basic, social and fun ways of learning lived happily ever after.

What's new since our last development update? (for those of you that didn't attend our launchparty) 1. Quizzes and Assignments We've added the possibility to create assignment and quiz chapters for your spaces. A quiz is a simple computer-graded multiple choice test - great for assessing your follower's knowledge before and after following your space! We've put a lot of effort in keeping the flow to create a quiz as simple as possible. Adding a quiz to your space should be a matter of seconds! In line with our vision of an open learning environment users are allowed to take a quiz as often as they want - while keeping their best result. And of course, after completing a quiz, anybody can comment on it. Assignment chapters are freeform and graded by the space owner. Users can submit their answers in markdown and upload files or images or use links and embeds. Space owners will be notified when there is a new submission to review. They can comment on the submission, and mark it as approved, which will complete te chapter for the user. 2. User Profiles Every LearningSpaces user now has their own profile, with a short bio, profile pic, latest activity and overview of their Spaces. 3. Power Users See that little trophy on my profile? That means I'm a Power User! LearningSpaces users earn reputation for creating Spaces and Chapters, and also for completing other people's Chapters. But most of all you will be rewarded when other people follow, interact with and complete your content! We hope this will help reward knowledge sharing and make the best spaces automatically stand out. And most likely, in the future, Power Users will become curators and protect content quality :). As soon as you are a Power User, your trophy will show on all your Spaces: 4. A little bit of awesomeness Like last time, we've worked on some not-so-useful but definitely awesome things, like showing the dominant color of a Space's header image when loading: Cool, right? Next up: Paths, the Space Wall, Drafts, Collaboration, Team Settings and more!

As you may have read before, we are using Helpful for customer support. Through Helpful, every single LearningSpaces user is one click away from our support team - which would be all of us. A couple of recurring questions got us thinking about onboarding new users. How can we help new users understand what LearningSpaces is and how it works? One of the solutions that came up was to create short explanatory videos for the most important views and features, and prompt new users to watch them. But before spending a week on writing scripts, recording screen captures and dubbing voice-overs, we decided - as usual - to start with a quick prototype. We wrote a 150-word script about the Spaces overview, got someone on Fiverr to record a voice-over for under 20$, and then used Quicktime and iMovie (both ship with OSX) for the screencapture and editing. You can watch the result here: Pretty cool right? Not bad for about 2 hours of work and 15$. And a great way to start testing if support videos can help the onboarding process. The Screencapture: Start QuickTime (and don't open a video in that annoying dialog) Press CTRL+CMD+N (or File > New Screen Recording) Select an area to record or go fullscreen. Record (I recorded to the voice-over so I needed 3 tries). Save, import in iMovie and match the timing with your voice over. Export and share! Bonus: go to System Preferences > Accessibility on your Mac, select Zoom and tick Enable keyboard shortcuts to zoom. The default shortcut is cmd+alt+8 - this will zoom in on the position of your cursor. You can put this to great use when highlighting specific features of your application.

6.45am The alarm on my iPhone rings and I have to get up, start the day. 7.00am I am checking the mail on my iPhone, is there anything new? The newspaper newsletters arriving in the morning will tell me everything I need to know about what's new in world. The weather app shows me whether I'll have to dress rain proof for my bike trip to work. Have I gotten a message from a friend? I'll quickly check it on WhatsApp. 9.00am At work I'll turn on my MacBook, first thing I'll do is checking and replying my emails. 9.15am What does the agenda of today look like? Let's have a look at OutlookOffice365. Don't forget to open HipChat so communication with collegues will flow. Also LearningSpaces has to be opened so I can use others' knowledge and make it my own. Yammer shows me what my collegues are up to and makes me stay in the loop. 12.45pm At lunch I'll quickly check WhatsApp again. Are the dinner plans with a friend tonight still on? After a quick table football game it's time to go back to work. 1.00pm Using One Drive and Google Docs collaboration with collegues goes easily. Also Twitter is handy to check once in a while. 6.30pm We're trying out a new recipe that we found on my friend's smart phone while listening to music on Spotify. 9.00am Back home I am facetiming with my mum, checking facebook and WhatsApp to see what's new with my friends, and read maybe even answer my emails. 11.00am Time to go to bed, so resetting the alarm, maybe checking my agenda on my iPhone so I am ready for tomorrow. So, do we actually need all this technology? If you would have asked me that question 10 years ago, I'd probably have said "No". But in this fast-moving world I cannot imagine myself living a life without it anymore. For instance Facetime: It's such a great way to communicate, no limitation to audio but being able to see each other while talking is amazing. And cheap if you compare it to calling over the phone (as my mum lives in a different country than me). All this technology I described above is definitly simplifying things for me a lot. Am I glad that it exists, I wouldn't want to miss anything!

The definition: Modern Learner — a person who likes learning what he wants and when he wants. Or one who’s learning needs or habits are changed by their distracting environments.  Features: overwhelmed, distracted, impatient. In the need of: personalized, interactive, fun, universal access and concentrated knowledge. Now, we have covered all of the important terms we can get more in depth about why. How modern learners came into being, how to help them and how can modern learners help you? Dear modern learner, First of all, why are you like this? Because you are reading this blogpost during your work, because your phone has a pushed notification every 2 minutes about what is happening on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, because you are distracted by almost everything that surounds you! Second of all, you need everything here and now, not in 3 days, but now. Probably your modern working environments led you to understanding that the knowledge should be very easy to reach, find and share. But what do you get in reality? Your employer has very high expectations for you to stay in the ‘Know everything’ zone and yet he often doesn’t provide you with the instant access to all of the knowledge that is contained within the organization you are working. Actually it doesn’t sounds fair neither for you nor for your employer because both of you want to end up in the win-win situation. A situation where you gain the knowledge that helps you to accomplish your tasks fast and effectively. Dear Employer, How can you enhance the learning potential of your employees? Just give them knowledge and games, let your employees learn whenever they can. First of all, you have to understand the benefits of personalised informal way of learning.  Creating informal learning situations can be less costly and more time efficient given all of the social media technologies and electronic devices we have today. Learning informally can be more personal and less intimidating for some people. Subject-matter experts may be more willing to share their knowledge with others this way. Since learning this way happens more naturally during the flow of someone’s work day, employees may be less likely to resist learning new things. Second of all, make learning more playful! The engagement of your employees will sky rocket. Quick facts about gamification:  Gamification is the use of game mechanics to drive engagement in non-game business scenarios and to change behavior of your employees. Many types of games include game mechanics such as points, challenges, leaderboards, rules and incentives that make game-play enjoyable. Gamification applies these to motivate the audience to higher and more meaningful levels of engagement. Humans are "hard-wired" to enjoy games and have a natural tendency to interact more deeply in activities that are framed in a game construct. Considering all of these facts, try to unleash the power of modern learner, encourage your employees to exchange their knowledge in informal way and it will make your business more successful. If you need any help with setting up your social learning platform contact us through www.learningspaces.io or maybe drop a DM or tweet us Twitter @learningspaces. (Some thoughts were taken from www.langevin.com and www.gartner.com, thank you guys!)