Social Learning has been big in 2012 but like any new fad it’s not clear to everyone exactly what it is. For me it looks very like knowledge management revived (see Social Learning and Knowledge Management) and it’s important not to confuse social learning with learning with the help of  social media (see What is social learning?). This infographic provides a vision of social learning the Skillsoft way. One problematic aspect of the social learning utopia is the Nielsen 1-9-90 rule: Jacob Nielsen coined a theory called the 1-9-90 theory that says out of every hundred people who join a community or network - 1% actively contribute - 9% contribute from time to time - and 90% are lurkers. Nielsen was describing behaviour on the internet and one would imagine that the figures would be better for an internal community but from my experience in KM it’s often a dedicated few that make the greatest contribution and after a while they just stop giving when everyone else appears to be taking. See this post from Paul Dunay for an interesting discussion on the 1-9-90 rule for internal communities like Yammer. Click on the link below the image to open the PDF and you can then click on elements in the PDF to learn more. Link: Skillsoft Social Learning Infographic The post Social Learning the Skillsoft Way appeared first on Designed For Learning.

Expand your learning options with this list of 13 ways to learn.Post from: The eLearning Coach13 Ways to Learn in 2013

  One of the current hot topics in e-learning is curation. But what exactly is curation? And what relevance does it have to e-learning? Interestingly the word derives from the Latin cura - meaning literally someone ‘who cares’. Curators have existed for thousands of years and their role is defined as follows: Traditionally, a curator or keeper of a gallery, museum, library or archive oversees an institution’s collections and is responsible for the safe keeping, display, documentation and interpretation of the objects and artefacts in the collection. Interpretation is the key word here. These institutions have substantial collections of objects and artefacts - way too much usually to put on display - so the role of the curator is to create an exhibit that combines a variety of artefacts in order that they may be interpreted in some way by the visitors. Interpretation is largely about telling stories. And not surprisingly it’s about learning so in that respect a curator is a sort of teacher. So in the simplest terms curation is about organising, displaying and interpreting stuff. More tellingly it’s about organising, displaying and interpreting other people’s stuff. Curation on the Web In this post I really want to focus on curation as it applies to learning (and specifically online learning) but before we do that it’s worth exploring the current trend for digital curation on the web. Curation is big on the web driven largely by a raft of new platforms such as Storify, Scoop.it and Pinterest that make it easy to collect, organise and display the articles, photos, and videos we come across while trawling the Internet. Curation with these tools appears to be primarily about aggregation and many curators place freshness above anything else so many curated collections end up looking like the front page of newspapers. Indeed many of the platforms are purposely designed to look like magazine pages. A scoop beats old ideas hands down in the attention economy. Learning is different to news. The important stuff is persistent. It has a long shelf-life. If you are new to e-learning then reading an article on ‘Social Learning’ isn’t going to be the best place to start your learning journey even if it is the hottest new topic. Curation applied to learning is going to be much more dependent on interpretation rather than organisation. Before our new e-learner reads about ‘Social Learning’ they should understand what an instructional designer does and why we need LMS’. But we are all creators not curators? When a client calls and wants a programme on equality and diversity we hardly ever say ‘That’s been done already - you can buy it off-the-shelf’. Our first instinct as learning designers (and business people) is to create shiny new learning experiences - designed precisely for the audience and content we have been given by the (paying) client. Why re-cycle old stuff when we can start afresh on a blank sheet? Well there are a number of possible reasons but four of the most compelling are: There’s already some really good stuff out there Content that already exists can be made available immediately It’s more interesting to mix and match than to build something homogenous It’s much more cost effective to recycle than to create something new Suddenly curation is sounding quite attractive if I’m trying to get as much learning done as I can on a limited budget and/or timescale. However curation is actually harder than it looks because the skill of the curator is in interpretation and in our case as learning designers in creating a coherent learning journey. To illustrate this let’s look at the place where we are most likely to have come across curator’s prior to 2012. Museum’s 20 years ago were a place you went to see things in glass cases with labels. Museum’s today take a very different approach. They create learning journey’s through the collection of artefacts on display. Modern museum curator’s are effectively learning designers working in a different medium - the medium of objects and artefacts. Effective curation involves a number of key skills: Finding With digital assets we have the advantage of powerful search and stacks of content feeds. Filtering We often need to look beyond the most popular stuff to filter out the older but more persistent stuff that we really need. Some things change slowly and often they are conceptually key. Facts not fads. Grading Not all content is appropriate for all audiences. If you are curating a collection on Roman technology for primary school kids it will feel quite different than if you were to curate the same collection for a graduate archaeology class. Synthesising Not all collections will speak for themselves. A curator’s role is to join the dots and to paint the bigger picture. Summarising Sometimes people need the condensed version. Sometimes they need the advanced guide. Signposting Sometimes people simply need to fills gaps in their knowledge. Signposting them to the bits they need or are interested in is a key curation skill. Balancing creation with curation In practice a successful online learning experience is likely to result in a mix of creation and curation. The relative amounts of each will depend on the subject matter and what is already available but I imagine an analysis and design loop along the following lines: Establish the learning objectives and intended audience Create a broad content outline and scope Find and filter existing digital assets Create a learning path design based on the curated assets Create additional content to fill the gaps Create the final learning journey Clearly there are challenges when developing learning using a mix of creation and curation. Do you have permission to use third party materials? Will they be there over the long term? What if they are updated or moved? In a future post I’ll look at some of the practical problems associated with curation and also explore some of the curation friendly learning platforms and technologies (such as the quirky Curatr from @benbetts). Tomorrow I’m at the Weelearning event in Bath -  ’Curate? Create? Debate?’. Some interesting contributions have been made to the pre-session Google Doc. Hopefully I can share those after the event. I’ve added this endpiece from Julian Stodd which was posted on the Weelearning Google Doc - it echoes some of my points quite nicely I think. My first job was in a museum, a local, dusty affair concerned primarily with telling the story of how the town had grown from it’s early marketplace origins through to it’s current shape and size. The story involved buildings, artefacts, documents and people. Indeed, one of my personal jobs was to go and record oral histories from elderly local residents: recordings that gave depth and flavour to exhibitions. From time to time, we would pull together an exhibition, and that’s when we would curate. It would start with us defining a central story: ‘The wool trade in Chichester’, or ‘The market traders’. Once we had the story, we would decide what, from the extensive collections, we would use to help us to tell it. The decisions were laden with subjectivity. For example, we had a coffin. It had been used to commemorate the last cattle market run in a continuous eight hundred year history. If you just saw it, it’s just a coffin. If you know the story, it represents (or signifies) something else entirely. The curator needs to understand the thing, but also the meaning of the thing. They are a historian and a storyteller. Julian Stodd   The post Create or Curate? appeared first on Designed For Learning.

Surprising insights from a hiring decision-maker.Post from: The eLearning CoachELC 001: Finding a Job in Instructional Design

Pull these levers a bit more with every new course.Post from: The eLearning Coach5 Levers Of eLearning Design

Redware App Store in the Technology Zone I went along last week to a pretty uninspiring World of Learning show. I wasn’t at the conference but I did catch some of the seminars in the various show ‘theatres’. World of Learning is normally heavily biased in favour of face-to-face training - but this year there was reasonable variety of learning technology solutions on offer. Not all of these are e-learning solutions, in fact the term e-learning wasn’t massively in evidence, but they do utilise technology in some way to support learning. Not surprisingly quite a few vendors are pushing mobile learning (m-learning). I had a play with a few of these m-learning solutions in the technology zone a special area where you could play with the devices and software without the vendor trying to sell to you. It’s a cool idea actually - something that would work well at Learning Technologies. In the technology zone I played with: Seminar Learning AuthorThis is a template driven rapid authoring environment that publishes iPad friendly content. It’s pretty easy to use and is a good alternative to Articulate Studio if you feel more comfortable with a template driven approach. It’s not cheap though at £995. Seminar Knowledge CentreI really like this simple no frills LMS from Seminar Learning (an offshoot of Information Transfer - now Aceton). I’ve played with a demo before and it’s easy to set-up and use. It also works really well on a tablet device. I’m going to do a full review in a forthcoming blog. Redware Learning App Store Redware appear to be the new kids on the m-learning block. I played with their mobile learning delivery platform which looked and worked just like Apple’s App store. It looked pretty cool but it was hard in the limited time I had to establish the full extent of their service/product offer. The web site isn’t much better I’m afraid and I couldn’t find a single screenshot of the tablet product. Nor any explainer videos which would really help. I did get a free bottle of tomato sauce however - now all I need is a bag of chips! Absorb LMSThis is a Flash based LMS which I have demoed in the past. It looks good but Flash powering your LMS? I don’t think so. Exscien Food Hygiene GameThis game is based on a 3D cartoon environment. It was fun to play for about 5 minutes but I would question the amount of learning that likely to take place. You can download the demo from Apple’s App Store - search for ‘KitchenMaster’. Exscien KitchenMaster It was good to see Moodle featured on at least three stands. Mind Click, CPD Online and Remote Learner. Franklin Covey were giving away free Nexus 7s but only of you had a lucky barcode on one of their flyers (sadly I didn’t so I’m going to have to actually buy one at some point). It’s amazing how much mileage a company can get out of one piece of IP ( Covey’s original Seven Habits book) but more of that in a forthcoming blog. I talked to quite a few of the conventional training companies - mainly to see what their position was on e-learning. Generally they still see it as poor solution that will hopefully go away. They are of course wrong. The problem many of them have is that their understanding of e-learning is poor. Typically they have seen a poorly designed page turner with a test at the end but they have little understanding of online learning beyond the 30 minute compliance driven e-learning module. Some see virtual classrooms and webinars as their route to online learning but their understanding of approaches beyond that is generally poor. I’m currently trying to work with the more enlightened ones - helping them to explore how online learning really can transform their learning offer, and more significantly, their business model too. On the subject of new business models Martin Belton and Kate Graham from Ascot Communications ran a seminar on learning marketplaces (Udemy, Course Park, Udacity, etc.) and launched their own platform called  MyLearningWorx. I’m a big fan of these marketplaces - they enable course designers to create complete courses (mainly using video) and sell them online. Some of the underlying LMS technologies are really impressive with the emphasis firmly on ease of use both for the course designer and the learner. MyLearningWorx is currently in beta but I’m hoping to get onboard and give it a test drive. See you at Learning Technologies in January! The post World of Learning 2012 appeared first on Designed For Learning.

Jane Bozarth, social media expert, reveals all.Post from: The eLearning CoachELC 002: Using Social Media For Learning

What is Curation? from Percolate on Vimeo. The post Video of the Week: Curation appeared first on Designed For Learning.

Make your interactions enjoyable and easy to use.Post from: The eLearning Coach10 Interaction Design Tips

This sketch describing the 'three Cs' was inspired by some research I was doing in preparation for tonight's Weelearning event on 'Curate? Create Debate!'.   The post Consume, Curate, Create! appeared first on Designed For Learning.