[Post by Greg Gammie, Implementations Manager at GeoMetrix Data Systems Inc.] The industry analysts at Bersin by Deloitte are currently conducting high-impact leadership research and would like to invite you to participate in the survey. If you are in a leadership position in your organization, they want to hear from you. This includes: C-suite, business unit, or functional leaders and HR, Talent Management, and/or Learning & Development leaders. To take the survey click this link: Bersin High-impact Leadership Survey or copy and paste the URL below into your internet browser: https://bersin.qualtrics.com/SE?SID=SV_5BTVF7TDURCHb9z&RID=CGC_018CMxj5XmxyKhf&Q_CHL=email Completion of the online survey takes between 10 and 15 minutes and as a thank-you for your time and effort you will receive access to the following Bersin resources: An instant snapshot of how others rate the leadership in their organization A link to our latest tool, the Leadership Development Maturity Assessment (Rapid) An executive summary of this study (when available) Your information will be kept entirely confidential and responses will be presented in aggregate form only. Your personal information is collected only for the purpose of sending you your thank you resource upon completion. Should you have any questions or comments, please contact Bersin at USBersinSurveyResponse@deloitte.com

Learning Technology for the 16 year old 21st Century Its now 16 years since the turn of the century during which time, Post-16 education has had the opportunity to embrace so called ‘21st century technology’ which to be fair has moved at an astonishing rate from the the introduction of Wikipedia in 2001 to what you […]

Effective governance is essential for steering, managing and sustaining a complex, cross-functional and multidisciplinary activity like innovation. Innovation governance itself can be thought of as "a system of mechanisms to align goals, allocate resources and assign decision-making authority for innovation, across the company and with external parties".

"Network thinking lets us scientifically understand the world around us as one of connections that shape observed phenomena, rather than as one where the intrinsic properties of people, genes, or particles determine outcomes. Like previous scientific revolutions, the network revolution also has the promise of reshaping our basic commonsense expectations of the world around us, and may allow us to recognize that we are not a basically individualistic, asocial, and quarrelsome creature that comes in bounded linguistic, ethnic, racial, or religious types, but a social species linked to one another by far-reaching network ties." - How Networks Are Revolutionizing Scientific (and Maybe Human) Thought - Scientific American Network thinking is the big shift needed, individually, organizationally, institutionally, and culturally. Getting to network thinking in our organizations is a learning challenge which three of Peter Senge’s five disciplines can help us with: mental models, building shared vision, and systems thinking. Individually we can develop personal mastery, another of Senge’s disciplines, through practices such as personal knowledge mastery in developing professional knowledge-sharing and sense-making networks. One learning accelerator is visualization, as once a network can be visualized, it can be discussed between people in order to understand it. Many organizations are struggling in adapting to the network era. Network thinking comes by engaging in networked conversations. This is often ignored when new technologies are adopted by institutions. Changing thinking takes time. Electric communication (digital & networked) is changing how we think. Being conscious of this change may help humanity face the many challenges confronting our global society. adapting to perpetual beta    

The introduction of a student-centered or learner-centered approach can be challenging for both students and instructors. While courseware can help optimize student-centered learning, there can still be pushback at the outset. Here are 7 articles that offer realistic, practical tips on how to navigate resistance to the learner-centered approach. Introducing Student-Centered Learning to Your Class How ‘Deprogramming’ Kids from How to ‘Do School’ Could Improve Learning by Katrina Schwartz Schwartz reports on how physics instructor Adam Holman turned a traditional classroom into one where the student was at the center. Holman had to overcome student resistance to taking responsibility for their own learning. He also acknowledges that instructors have difficulties as well. Schwartz offers Holman’s excellent reading list to support why and how to make the transition to a learner-centered strategy. Two of those articles are featured among the 6 annotated below. Responding to Resistance to the Learner-Centered Approach Navigating the Bumpy Road to Student-Centered Instruction by Richard M. Felder and Rebecca Brent Brent and Felder review many of the common reactions of students and instructors to introducing student-centered learning. They focus on faculty concerns such as how to minimize the number of students who take credit for group work in which they did not participate and how to cover your syllabus using learner-centered activities. Brent and Felder admit that student-centered instruction (SCI) is not perfect, but in the end, it is the best teaching strategy. Students may complain about the change, but they definitely benefit from it. Some complaints are even about positive aspects—one student complained in his "list of dislikes" that the teacher made him think! Getting Started 4: Students (What if students are an obstacle to student-centered learning?) by Cathy Davidson Davidson discusses the difficulties students may have with a learner-centered approach. She offers 5 strategies for how to help "the student who hates student-centered learning." Creating a Student-Centered Classroom, Center for Instructional Practice, Champaign College This article focuses on 3 styles of student motivation: "goal-oriented, relationship-oriented, and learning-oriented." Strategies to reach each type of student in a learner-centered environment are described. Ten Strategies for Getting Students to Take Responsibility for their Learning by Sara Jane Coffman Coffman offers sound principles of a learner-centered classroom including "model higher cognitive skills" and "don’t try to save your students." Sermons for Grumpy Campers by Richard M. Felder In this article, Felder scripts responses to student objections such as Those group activities in class are a waste of time. I’m paying tuition for you to teach me, not to trade ideas with students who don’t know any more than I do! Felder’s sample "mini-sermons" are directed at each objection and explain in different ways why student-centered learning is better than traditional instructional models. Technology Tips for Student-Centered Learning Putting Students in the Driver’s Seat: Technology Projects to Decrease Passivity by Ike Shibley Shibley, an advocate for blended learning, discusses how to get students active in their own learning through the use of technology in assignments.

As we enter the new year 2016, we’re bound to admit that we are very excited by the new User Interface for the GamEffective platform. The old User Interface did well for us. We deployed it with happy corporate customers, their employees used it for a gamification experience that improved performance, learning or both and we even got recognized as the leading platform in enterprise gamification. Still, we knew it was time to upgrade and make sure that our many insights of real-life workforce gamification deployments need to be embodied in a new user interface. This is why we are thrilled to announce the re-designed user interface. You can read more about its different elements here.   All this isn’t just about a change of fonts or colors in GamEffective’s product. On top of a simpler and streamlined backend system, so that managers can adjust games on the fly, as well as a better analytics module which allows for game optimization, the exposure of KPIs, missions and the addition of a social feed are all valuable improvements to the system.      

The London International Mime Festival  is taking place from Saturday 9 January to Saturday 6 February 2016. It  is an annual theatre event in London and it features live art, new circus, clown and physical theatre at various London venues. It was established in 1977 by Joseph Seelig and Nola Rae.Click on my Blendspace lesson below to get more information. An example of a Mime Performance at the FestivalMime stimulates imagination, physical control and self confidence, moreover non-verbal language is doubtless a very important part of the communication (most of all for non-native speakers who use it while speaking a foreign language to be better understood!). For these reasons I prepared a lesson for esl students about miming and non-verbal language,  using some sources from the Web.What does "mime" mean?http://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/mimeLet's attend a Mime Workshop!http://drama-in-ecce.com/2012/05/11/mime-workshop-for-all-ages/Some Esl Miming Games!http://www.teach-this.com/esl-games/miming-games Miming Games Worksheetshttp://www.eslprintables.com/games_worksheets/miming_games/ Let's have fun with mime vocabulary and theatre audience etiquette with flashcards, quizzes, tests and games!https://quizlet.com/14677902/mime-vocabularytheatre-audience-etiquette-flash-cards/Can you guess what they are miming?What is non-verbal communication?https://www.andrews.edu/~tidwell/bsad560/NonVerbal.html Cultural differences in non-verbal communicationAs an Italian, I can say that non-verbal communication is very important in my language!(slides from  my presentation "Differences between Italians and British")Watch the following videosNow describe some gestures or body movements that are typical of your own culture.

I don’t know about you, but one of the things I enjoy about holidays is a bit of a digital switch off.  Much as twitter is my "go to" network, it has evolved into a primarily work related space for me. I try not to "be" on twitter out of office hours/weekends and holidays. It’s too much like being at work.  My automatic daily update ensures I still have one tweet a day, and I do share the odd Instagram picture.  There are of course exceptions such as the Eurovision Song Contest which is just so much better with a twitter feed. Watching Question Time live with twitter on the other hand is not such a good plan, it is just a spiral of rage and despair imho. Like many others my digital presence is constantly evolving.   A couple of years ago, when Twitter was new and exciting, I would check my stream and tweet along with everyone else. Now I tend to use Facebook more for connections with friends and family "out of office hours".  Over the past few years I’m actually sharing photos more via instagram for quick sharing to FB and sometimes Twitter. Over the past three years I’ve been using the Blipfoto site to share a photo a day. This is a totally different network for me and one I really value. I also get my best stats there. I wish as many people read this blog as looked at my pictures! Like others have pledged to pay to keep the service alive. Over the holidays I did decided to experiment  with Periscope the broadcast service from Twitter. When I say experiment, I mean it was more a spur of the moment thing.  I have used Periscope once before at the last Open Data Glasgow meet-up as an emergency streaming solution. A few days before Christmas, my Mum who was staying with me decided to make mince pies one evening. Instead of trying to explain Periscope to her I decided just to show her, and so our first (and I have to say funniest) broadcast began. Much to my surprise we got 34 viewers - I think I actually knew 2 of them. Fuelled by our success (and perhaps a glass of wine) the next day we decided to do the same as she made some meringues.  We got about 40 viewers this time including Lawrie Phipps with whom I had the brief twitter chatter below (click the image to see the storify version) and prompted this post. I’m still trying to figure out what Periscope means to my digital presence but I do think it has huge potential for education. Like anything without any control over who views, or interacts with you, it will take a bit of time, and initially some pretty digitally confident people to experiment with it.  I don’t know if I am digitally confident or digital careless - probably a bit of both, so later in the holidays I did another broadcast with my 8 year old niece as she and my Mum made pancakes. This time we hit the giddy heights of 130 viewers, and got the first taste of the down side of open broadcasting in this way. Some idiot and that’s the only polite word I can think of to use, started randomly typing "sex" then "porno". In my best school teacher voice I told them, politely but firmly to go away and get their kicks somewhere else.  They did. On reflection I can see how that kind of interaction would have freaked a lot of people out, and would have turned them off using periscope or other services all together. It exemplifies in a very "lite" way the scary/nasty side of making yourself openly available online. It just made me sad that people feel the need to behave in that way, and have that kind of negative, pointless digital presence. In terms of education I think we need to be taking control of these kind of spaces, not running away from them or trying to lock them down all together. Of course, I wouldn’t advocate every child to start broadcasting themselves all the time at school and or home. However we could use this type of instant broadcasts in lots of creative, positive ways in learning and teaching; particularly around practical demonstrations, critiques/review etc as well as formal/informal group working). I think HE should be leading the way in this as we all increase our fully online delivery. In terms of recruitment, there’s huge potential for interviews (formal and informal), virtual open days etc. At GCU we actually did Periscope bits of our last open day. It is going to take time to figure it all out, again open practices, research and auto-ethnographic approaches are going to become increasingly important. It’s only by sharing and developing our narratives of these types of experiences that we will be able to make any kind of sense of the educational potential of services such as Periscope and how they fit into our evolving notions and experiences of our own and our students digital presence(s). My holiday experiments have definitely encouraged me think more seriously about how to use Periscope in my context and with my colleagues. My Mum and I may still try to get a Mary Berry type deal somewhere and give up all this education stuff . . .

How You Can Help Your Subject Matter Expert Create Effective eLearning Content An experienced Subject Matter Expert is one of the most valuable assets you can have at your disposal. The key is knowing how to help them create an amazing eLearning course. In this article, I’ll share 6 top tips you can use to give your Subject Matter Expert the guidance they need to create effective online content. Your Subject Matter Experts may be in charge of identifying the key takeaways and narrowing the scope of your eLearning course material. However, that doesn’t mean they have to go it alone. In fact, there are a variety of ways that Instructional Designers can help their Subject Matter Experts create more effective and engaging eLearning content. Not only will this speed up the eLearning development process, but it also boosts the benefits your audience is going to receive. Here are 6 tips and techniques for offering a helping hand to your Subject Matter Expert. Be clear about expectations and objectives. As is the case with any professional, a Subject Matter Expert must have a clear idea of what’s expected of them before the eLearning project begins. They must also be certain of the shared goals and objectives of the eLearning course. This is why it’s essential to have a discussion with them in advance to let them know their job responsibilities and how they fit into the eLearning development team. It’s also wise to talk about deadlines and milestones, so that they can be aware of when each step of the process must be completed. If they are left in the dark about all of these key issues, then they are likely to become frustrated or discouraged by the experience because they’ve been left out of the loop. You may even want to provide your Subject Matter Expert with examples of what you have in mind, and definitely get their feedback and address any concerns they might have. Work together to create a successful eLearning strategy. Your Subject Matter Expert should be an integral part of your eLearning team. In fact, you should have them on hand when making any major decisions about the eLearning project, especially if it pertains to the eLearning content and online activities. Keep in mind that the Subject Matter Expert can offer you a wealth of information about the topic, which can then pass onto your audience. However, if you don’t work together to develop a winning eLearning strategy, then you are missing out on a big opportunity. Your Subject Matter Expert should also know as much as possible about your online learners, such as their background, as well as what they need to take away from the eLearning experience. Focus on how learners can use the information to achieve eLearning goals. One of the most significant obstacles that Subject Matter Experts face when developing eLearning content is differentiating between the information learners need in the real world and information that might be good to know. Stress the importance of creating eLearning content that centers on goal achievement and real life challenges. Focusing on extraneous info that is not necessarily in-line with the overall goals of the eLearning course can also lead to cognitive overload. This prevents the learners from absorbing and retaining the key pieces of knowledge, which diminishes the value of the eLearning course. Have a discussion with your Subject Matter Expert about each of the learning objectives to be covered and how the eLearning content, activities, and online assessments are going to further those goals. Ask them to step inside the shoes of the learner. It can be easy to distance yourself from the eLearning experience, itself, when you are trying to create an eLearning course. However, it is important for Subject Matter Experts to occasionally step inside the shoes of the learners and see things from their perspective. Encourage them to take a close look at all of the eLearning content and online resources as if they were actually taking the eLearning course. Does the eLearning content give them the information they need in a timely manner? Does it focus on the specific skills they require in their personal and professional lives? Are there areas of the eLearning course that may be confusing or difficult to understand? Make the learners work for the information. In some instances, a Subject Matter Expert may simply offer the learner information outright, rather than making them search for it in the eLearning content. In other words, they don’t make them work for the knowledge and skill development. Encourage your Subject Matter Experts to focus on knowledge discovery instead of knowledge presentation. For example, they can include thought provoking questions or online scenarios that allow leaners to explore the situation and how their actions lead to consequences. If a learner is able to find the information on their own they are more likely to remember and recall it in their "moment of need". Remind them that learners do not need to become Subject Matter Experts. A learner does not need to become an expert in the topic, unless, of course, that is the objective of the eLearning course. Instead, they need to be able to carry out a task or expand their knowledge base within a limited scope. They also don’t have a great deal of time to engage in the eLearning experience, which means that you need to focus on what’s really important. The Subject Matter Expert has a vast amount of experience in the field, but they need to bear in mind that learners simply need to remember the key takeaways and achieve their goals. Helping your Subject Matter Expert to create more effective eLearning content for your eLearning course is a win-win situation for everyone. You can use these 6 tips to make your design and development process productive, and to support your Subject Matter Expert to the best of your ability. Remember, a great Subject Matter Expert is worth their weight in gold, and offering them the guidance they need can foster a long lasting eLearning partnership. Looking for additional tips on to work with Subject Matter Experts? Read the article Working With Subject Matter Experts: The Ultimate Guide to learn how build a respectful working relationship with Subject Matter Experts in order to facilitate your eLearning design and development process. The post 6 Tips To Help Your Subject Matter Expert Create Effective eLearning Content appeared first on Litmos.