When we start exploring Experience API, xAPI, one of our interest is self-reporting. We talked about the reason in this post "Tell Your Own Learning Story through #xAPI". Of course this topic is very controversy. But the basic idea is xAPI data can form a great feedback to learners and help learners improve their learning... Read More ›

E-learning is becoming a popular solution for internal training in corporations. It saves time, money and encourages learning together. As a manager you might be asking: How do I create an e-learning strategy? What should I take into account? We … Continue reading →

Get a free ebook copy of the book written by Andrea White (former Houston mayor Bill White's wife).WINDOWS ON THE WORLD is science fiction set in a post-apocalyptic world in which an orphan girl, Shama Katooee, is summoned to an elite military academy in order to travel back in time to New York City on September 11, 2001, to save the future. http://www.namelos.com/blog.php

This keeps happening to me. My RSS Reader gets filled up in no time so that I have hundreds of unread posts. I have to have a read-in to clear them all. It’s not as if I don’t read posts, but it just keeps happening if I miss a day or so. I find it a pain to catch up.Part of my problem is that I have an eclectic taste for topics - just check out my index and you’ll see what I write about.500 blogs a day!Just over a year ago I read about Kevin Hodgson and his amazing use of the RSS Reader - skimming 500 blogs a day. I even posted about it! At the time, I thought that this was something I might aspire to.Not any more. I have 156 subscriptions in my reader at the moment.Over the year I’ve been blogging, many bloggers have posted with disdain about their RSS Reader getting clogged up with unread posts. It’s often because they’ve been busy with a project, or been on vacation for a while. I’ve even been daft enough to try to give advice to some who may have requested it - but I was sticking my neck out - I’m certainly no expert at this. Here’s some of the things I (tried to) do:Try to get realI just get real and cull. But where to start is always the difficult decision. I recall Sue Waters commenting on how often a blogger should post. She wasn’t so much giving advice on the frequency of posting, more reporting on what she’d learnt about teachers and what they preferred when it came to a blogger’s rate of output - all useful information. Sue spoke of "readers in the edublogger community who unsubscribe if a blogger posts too frequently".She made me think immediately of a few bloggers whose sites I’d already subscribed to and who thump out more posts in a day than I could possibly publish in a week! No names mentioned here, but some of these sites are owned by ace bloggers. Their stuff is worthwhile reading, and I just do not want to remove subscriptions to their sites.I’m always reluctant to cull blogs just because they happen to be on the list and haven’t posted in ages. Providing their stuff is good, I don’t mind the subscriptions staying where they are - no problem.Syndicate sites I subscribe to a number of syndicate sites and I also subscribe to the contributing sites. I could unsubscribe these individual sites, but I often find the individual subscriptions useful. Anyway, they are really just nuisance value, for if I’ve read the posts from one subscription it’s easy to mark as read on the other.So what do I do? Develop some whiz routine for culling subscriptions? Ignore the counter on the RSS Reader and continue reading as normal?What do you do to keep the subscriptions in your RSS under wraps?

Source: BestComputerScienceSchools.net On the original Star Trek TV series from the 1960s, they had their fictional replicator technology that materialized food, drink and non-edible objects. Well…now 3D printing is turning fiction into fact. There’s even a 3D printer by MakerBot Industries called the Replicator. Okay, we’re not quite at the Star Trek level yet, but... Read More ›

You may have noticed that our forums have a fresh new look. This is just the beginning. We’ll be releasing major updates with you through August and September, as we continue to make the Eliademy experience the best we possibly … Continue reading →

Once upon a time, I worked at a small company. Because I knew the business and had helped design our software package, and because I was pretty good in front of a crowd, I ended up doing the training. One thing led to another and a couple of years later, I got hired at a small multi-media production company that developed corporate training programs delivered on CD ROMs.  My new job title: "instructional designer."  I’d never even heard the term, but here I was—off to the races—in what’s turned into a rather healthy career in elearning.  16 years later I’m still at it, designing elearning programs for the (mostly) corporate market.  It’s what I do - and, hopefully, what I do well.  But I got here pretty much by accident.What about you? How did you find your way into this role? How did you end up designing elearning programs?  Is this what you wanted to be when you grew up?Me? I had visions of becoming a high school English teacher or a writer of fine American novels. And while elearning design isn’t all that, it’s sometimes a whole lot more.  In my role, I teach, I write, I schmooze, I share, I design, I create, and I learn.Because although I’m here completely by accident, I’ve tried to invest myself in this business with passion and spirit.  I walked into this field not knowing how to spell instructional design. And while I’ve never taken a formal class or gotten a fancy graduate degree in instructional design, I have spent a LOT of time learning the basics and honing my craft.  Maybe it’s some deep rooted inferiority complex, but my desire is to do my job to the best of my abilities.Here are three things I regularly do to learn more about this profession and keep my passion for what I do at a gentle boil:Read, read, readI get geeky and read instructional design textbooks.  I learn about learning. I read up on visual design and design in general.  I read books about business and consulting.  And I also read novels and poetry and non-industry stuff to make sure I’m continuing to fill my creative cup.  Over the years I’ve created a reading list for Instructional Designers. What about you? Are you reading about this stuff in your spare time? What books or resources have you learned the most from?Conferences I speak at a lot of conferences. As a speaker, I need to know my stuff, otherwise the crowd starts throwing tomatoes at me.  Speaking keeps me on my game.  And while I’m at these conferences, I get to go learn myself.  Good stuff.  And not just at sessions, but while connecting with peers and colleagues over coffee or late night karaoke.  Elearning people tend to be pretty passionate. Find your people and learn from them!ASTD’s TechKnowledge (coming up January 30-February 1, 2013 in San Jose) is a great place to learn more about elearning and connect with other learning geeks.  Are you going? If it’s not in your plan yet, make it happen!  Speaking proposals are being accepted until June 10.  Make this be your inaugural year!  http://old.astd.org/content/conferences/techknowledge/RFPtk/CommunitySpeaking of people, there’s a lot to learn from each other even when we’re not in the same room together.  When I was first getting my ID passion on, it was all about the blogging community and man-oh-man did I connect to a lot of great people through blogging.  It’s been a great place to document and process my own learning journey, and a fabulous way to connect with other elearning professionals.These days, a lot of the community activity is on Twitter, where you can be up close and personal with great learning minds like Jane Bozarth (@janebozarth), Clark Quinn (@quinnovator) and Karl Kapp (@kkapp).  For blogs of interest, be sure to check out the eLearning Learning blog feed aggregator (http://www.eLearninglearning.com/). Jane Hart’s lists tweeters in the learning and development space. (http://c4lpt.co.uk/social-learning-handbook/workplace-learning-professionals-who-blog-andor-tweet/).Who do you learn from? Do you have a mentor you can bounce ideas off of or who can gently steer you into new areas of learning? Who are you connecting with and learning from online?What’s in your personal learning plan?So what’s your game plan for getting better at what you do?  Do you take classes? Go to free online webinars? Write books? Look at lots and lots of elearning programs for inspiration? What helps you create and sustain passion for this work?  Would love to hear your ideas and inspirations in the comments here—and/or find me on Twitter! @cammybean. -------------------Cammy Bean is the VP of Learning Design for Kineo US (www.kineo.com) and has been accidentally doing elearning since the mid-90s. A frequent conference speaker and active blogger, Cammy served as the ASTD TK12 Planning Committee Chairperson and will be a featured speaker at this year’s ASTD LearnNow conferences in Boston (July 25-26).  You can find Cammy’s blog at http://cammybean.kineo.com/.

The primary purpose of the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) is supporting end-user search and discovery of educational resources. The focus is on human discovery using search engines, not machine discovery. The project will create a metadata extension that builds on the work of Schema.org, the recently-announced Bing/Google/Yahoo! project to develop and encourage use of metadata vocabularies that... Read More ›

In recent months, there has been discussion in the blogosphere over the attributes and cognitive powers of the brain. This month, Clive Shepherd has completed a splendid series of posts on John Medina’s Brain Rules, documenting clearly his own interpretations of the book.I have not yet read Brain Rules, but I’m grateful to Clive for his explicit summaries and interpretations. Whichever way you look on it, plainly, the brain is a wonderful organ.My late comment on Clive’s post speculates that the aspects he analysed and reported from Medina’s book did not include an important feature of the brain, that being it’s power to believe. In this post I put forward some thoughts around the idea that the faculty of presumption, in the contexts of observation, perception and reason, is a feature of the brain that can shape the way we learn and also affect the way we think.What is belief?Beliefs are formed through our experiences from the moment of birth. Wikipedia describes ‘belief’ as, "the psychological state in which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true." It further explains that "mainstream psychology and related disciplines have traditionally treated belief as if it were the simplest form of mental representation and therefore one of the building blocks of conscious thought".Philosophies to do with belief are complex and varied. Some might even argue that belief is one of the cornerstones of philosophy. Many of the features that are associated with belief can also be attributed to, or have close counterparts in the strange and capricious emotion of trust.AuthorityThe weight of authority can be a useful lever in forging belief but it can also be flawed. For as much as it may be argued that authority can be an influencing factor in learning, it is the action of the brain of the learner that permits an authoritative influence to be successful or otherwise.History is strewn with examples of recalcitrant learners who earned the displeasure of their authoritative teachers. Yet authority has also fashioned and propagated belief, and learning through that belief, in the intelligent minds of many scholars. This has gone on for hundreds of years - some of it quite fallacious.Misconception and erroneous beliefTeachers hope for learner minds that are pliable and mobile. In many disciplines, tutors select their students from young children, it being well known that suppleness of mind prevails in the young.As a teacher, I’ve often been guilty of using a strategy that I call unteaching. Execution of this mode of persuasion entails dismantling possible misconception and seemingly erroneous belief in the mind of the learner.A way to achieving this is brought about by revealing tactfully to the learner those aspects of their knowledge or beliefs that may be wanting or mistaken in some important detail. Once the major parts of the assumed learning obstacles are removed, the remnants are eradicated through the application of appropriate pedagogy.Such action is nevertheless presumptive on the part of the teacher:that the original belief in the mind of the learner is flawed:that belief in the mind of the teacher is legitimate and authentic.The presumption can take on an authoritative tone. Some look on it as imposed dogma rather than useful and principled guidance.Whatever the interpretation, it’s the belief formed and held in the mind of the learner that has a powerful bearing on what is learnt and how that learning develops. This applies as much to a young child as to an experienced and mature employee in the workplace. The part that confidence plays in supporting belief is useful to learner and teacher.Belief directs learningIf the learner’s belief is congruent to what's being taught, the teacher may have no problem. But if that belief is not aligned to what is taught a number of scenarios can arise:- revelation by the learner in a new understanding- active discussion about aspects of the learner's belief(related to what's being learned)- enlightenment of both learner and teacher through discussion(sometimes the teacher learns more than the learner)- no significant change in what the learner knows- hardening of the learner's original belief.Human perceptual psychology - believing is seeingClive reviews Medina’s Rule 10: Vision trumps all other senses.He quotes, "We do not see with our eyes. We see with our brains.We actually experience our visual environment as a fully analysed opinion about what the brain thinks is out there."In short, our opinion of what exists is what we believe we see.It relies on expectation, related to processes that occur in the higher levels of the brain. The perceptual experience initiated by what is observed is resolved by a complex series of processes in the peripheral and central nervous system.The final interpretation is of a meaningful representation of observed events. Otherwise referred to as cognition, it involves memory and schema - a complex network of abstract mental structures that represent an understanding of what is perceived to exist.Many so-called optical illusions draw on this aspect of perception. What is seen, interpreted and recognised through perception is believed.The Ames Trapezoid, for instance is such an illusion in 3 dimensions. Another, in 2 dimensions, is the Fraser spiral shown below.For as much as our perception tells us that we see a spiral, it takes a careful tracing of the loops with a finger to prove that the diagram is really a series of concentric circles - no spiral exists.Even then, we may not be convinced, and perhaps try the finger tracing test several times before conceding that what we think we see is just an illusion. Test it for yourself.What do you think about belief as an aspect of the human brain?What part does it play in learning?Do you go through life testing your own beliefs?Or do you accept the authoritative viewpoint of others?

Today we would like to introduce you to a very special Eliademy teacher, Ms. Aubrey Esmeralda. Aubrey is a certified English and Filipino/Tagalog teacher from the Province of Antique in Philippines. A teacher of 14 years of experience, Aubrey has … Continue reading →

Receive a constant stream of free business and technology related resources such as eBooks, white papers, downloads, magazines, and analyst reports. All are absolutely free!Check it out:  http://www.tradepub.com/?p=main&page=mobile

I met for coffee this past week with someone who’s looking to break into the elearning industry.  She wanted to know where she should be looking and what the hot topics out there are.  I was giving her my 12,000 foot lay of the land, this is what I see going on kind of a thing.  It was so interesting to step by and take stock of what’s happening. Here’s where I see elearning going down these days:Corporate Training and Performance ImprovementInternal L&D departments and vendors designing and developing online learning programs for use within  corporate organizations.  This is 90% of what I do and I imagine the case for a lot of you people reading this post.Leadership Training for Corporate:You look at the ASTD ICE expo list and it’s filled with loads of leadership consulting and training companies. The Franklin Coveys, Ken Blanchards, etc.  This is it’s whole behemoth sector in the market - it includes a lot of classroom training and increasingly elearning programs as part of those solutions.K-12:Lots of elearning happening in the school sector.  Although, I haven’t seen much of great quality.  My son has to do some of his math homework online: really basic games.  He says, "I’m not learning, I’m just getting bored!"  Hopefully there’s a lot more than that going on.  Higher Ed:Want a master’s degree or a BA? Chances are these days you can take some, if not all of your degree program, online.  And of course there’s the latest MIT/Harvard online education initiative EdX.  eLearning design for semester long courses is a different beast than your corporate training elearning design where you’re creating a 30 minute course on the latest policy.  I suspect making a jump from higher ed to the corporate world and vice versa would be a big change -- and quite possibly a completely different skill set.For Profit:We’re starting to see the for-profit universities offering their curriculums up to the corporate market.  At Corporate University Week, I heard the story of the Verizon degree program for store managers being offered in partnership with Bellevue University (here’s my blog post on the Verizon/Bellevue story from last November). The Consumer Market:Just bought a fancy new camera? Maybe that company has some fancy elearning to help you learn how to use it.  More and more we’ll be seeing companies striving to increase their market share by creating value added programs like online learning to help people use their products better.  Because the better pictures you take with that fancy camera, the greater your loyalty AND the more you’ll get out there and evangelize about that camera.  Health Care/Mental Health:I think this is a niche area that’s only going to continue to grow.  It’s getting specific resources, information and strategies out to the general public - either through an insurance company as part of their overall benefits offerings, or as programs individuals can purchase online with a credit card.  I’ve been involved in two such programs in the past two years and I think it’s a really interesting space.  Want to help people and make a difference in the lives of individuals?  Start poking around here.I just pulled this list out of my head.  I’m sure I’ve missed a lot of big buckets and welcome your additions in the comments.The bottom line is that elearning/online interactive ‘stuff’ is increasingly accepted.  Who hasn’t searched on YouTube to figure out how to stop a leaking toilet? It’s just what we do.  And while more and more of the content out there is user generated (power to the people!), organizations are paying attention.Organizations in all sectors are figuring out how to create a valuable presence online that will meet the needs of their audience (consumers, students, employees, human beings).  Elearning is happening everywhere - even if that’s not what it’s called.If you’re trying to break into "the field" - just remember that it’s a huge field.  Figure out where you want to shine and make your difference.  

"Learning Analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs." — from SoLAR (Society for Learning Analytics Research, www.solaresearch.org) Open Learning Analytics, an integrated & modularized platform, was proposed by SoLAR to build an open platform... Read More ›

Without frugality, none can be rich,and with it very few would be poor.- Samuel Johnson -Last week the New Zealand Lotteries Commission handed out over $36,000,000 to the winning ticket held by a syndicate of four people. Before the draw, there was speculation in discussion on radio and television, on the Internet and elsewhere as to what the winners might do with the money during the rest of their lives.Evidence on the life and history of past multimillion winners suggested that an amazingly large proportion of them managed to spend the lot within less than two years. The adage, "penny wise, pound foolish", seems to ring true.Frugal return?I was brought up in the 50s and 60s. In those years I acquired education enough to understand what was meant by the ‘use-once-throw-away society’. I was a bit of a handyman in my teens. My mother called me Tinkerer. I took apart broken appliances that people had discarded, primarily to see how they’d worked and to establish why they didn’t.If I managed to fix something, and curiously that happened on occasion, I usually gave it back to its previous owner. There were two reasons for this. One was that my mother disliked me hoarding ‘stuff’. The other was that often I got some small reward for my effort. I still possess an oddly hand-painted vase given to me 50 years ago by a grateful neighbour whose clock I'd mended.Planned obsolescence?There came a time when fixing things was more difficult. Clusters of individual components of manufactured goods were gradually replaced with sealed ‘black boxes’ hard to dismantle, difficult to repair and even more challenging to reassemble. They were key to the functionality of the contraption to which they belonged. Apparently they were selected to malfunction one after the other, with perhaps only a few weeks between each carefully planned event.Replacing a ‘black box’ was unbelievably costly. Most faulty ‘black boxes’ ended up in the landfill still intimately connected to their associated appliances. When considering repair, buying a brand-new version of the appliance was often an attractive option in view of the expense-free term of use guaranteed to the owner.As more of the componentry in gadgets became modularised, the day-to-day maintenance of the material world I lived in continued to become costlier. There came a need for greater incomes at a time of plenty, when meeting that need was moderately easy to achieve.Environment of plenty?Variety became a feature of the available range of manufactured goods. It was essential to meet the demand of every whim of fashion, style, functionality, design and cost. Just take a look at any stretch of motorway during the rush hour. Notice the plethora of brand, shape, size and colour of cars, burning their slow petroleum trails to their destinations.Society has inherited a legacy - a way of life that’s going to be difficult to maintain. And there’s more. The discarded products of the bygone boom-times are already impinging on the environment of plenty, so the experts say. Embedded in that legacy-way-of-life are philosophies and cultures that are seemingly reflected in what we see on the Internet.Where did efficiency go?I tinkered around with computers in the early 80s. One of the golden rules I learnt while writing computer programs in basic, was to do with brevity and efficient use of code. A computer with a random access memory of 640 kilobytes was a luxurious acquisition in those days - and it wasn’t cheap.Today I upload optimised pix of about 4 Mb each from my digital camera, to an app in the clouds that I didn’t pay for, at least not directly.We have hand-held devices that boast hundreds of gigabyte memory capacity accessed with a stroke of a finger. We’re told of the coming Graphene chip that promises 100 to 1000 times the speed and capacity of present-day microchips.The last time I scoured cyberspace for data on the abundance of (free) web2.0 applications, I gathered handfuls of sites. Each of them boasted several dozen to a hundred links to web2.0 applications. Most recently, in my fevered attempt to find a single alternative to PhotoShop, I found dozens of free download offers for applications that claimed most if not all of the functionality I needed.Time of plenty?People everywhere celebrate a time of plenty. Most of us find comfort in abundance. In particular, we feel that limited choice is too restrictive,a way of thinking that, for some, has been tuned by MS apps providing numerous different routes and methods to do exactly the same thing. The principle seems to be, ‘why offer a hundred ways to do something when you can offer it in a hundred and one?’I wonder about this aspect of the culture that exists in western society. We know that we cannot continue to pursue the abundance that’s invariably presented, recognised, consumed and discarded. We know that continuing to do this returns a series of unwelcome consequences, some of which are perhaps yet to be revealed.Maybe we should give more thought to frugality?A Green Pen Society contributionrelated posts - >> ( 2 ) ( 1 )

When we think of online courses, oftentimes we think of videos, text, slideshow, quizzes and all the other elements that come with an traditional, educational offering. But, what if you don’t have the time to sit down and fix your … Continue reading →

"The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health  released Partnering to Heal: Teaming Up Against Healthcare-Associated Infections, an interactive computer-based video-simulation training program. Healthcare-associated infections harm many patients, causing injury and raising costs. On average, 1 in 3 patients admitted to a hospital suffers a medical error or adverse event and at any given time about 1 in every 20 patients is affected by an infection related to hospital care. On average, 1 in 7 Medicare beneficiaries is harmed in the course of care, costing the government an estimated $4.4 billion every year. To help address this public health challenge, the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health developed Partnering to Heal. This training program permits viewers to "become" one of five characters who can make decisions that impact health risks, and then view the results of those decisions and learn from the outcomes. It is designed to be used by students in the health professions, early-career clinicians, and other healthcare personnel, as well as patients and families to help prevent infections acquired in hospitals and other healthcare settings. Available online at no cost, Partnering to Heal promotes a team-based approach to reducing preventable infections and deaths in the United States."Check it out:  http://www.hhs.gov/ash/initiatives/hai/training/

Last winter, I was on a cub scout camping trip with my son.  Me and a bunch of dads.  The inevitable "what do you do for a living conversation" came up over pancakes.  I hadn’t gotten too far into the "I design corporate training programs that people take online" description before one of the dads started hissing at me.  Literally.  He formed his fingers into a cross and said, "You’re the CBT Lady!" Visions of a hair-netted lunch lady serving up sloppy joes.  Is that what I am?He went on to describe the true horrors he had suffered while forced to complete hour after endless hour of boring, locked down elearning programs:   "They make us sit through this long audio and you can’t click next until it’s over and then you get to the end of the quiz and you have to take all twenty questions over again because you got one question wrong!"I attempted to defend myself and our profession.  "We try to do it better than that! That’s not what we’re about!" I protested.  My words fell on deaf ears.  This man had suffered and would hear nothing more.Weeks later he introduced me to his wife and I got the exact same treatment. She works in the pharmaceutical industry and had similar tales of woe and suffering at the hands of elearning. "Honey, she’s the CBT Lady!"The point is, this is what a lot of people think of this profession and the work that elearning designers and developers put out there in the name of training.  Is this what you want your name on? Is this how you want to be known? So before you go out and spend another minute planning your next learning initiative, go out and find out just how what you’re already doing is being perceived.  Do you know how the people in your organization currently view your formal learning offerings? Is classroom training seen as punishment for poor performance or a careless slip of the tongue? Or is it a breezy day or two out of the office with free lunch?  What about elearning? Is it a task to be endured while otherwise multitasking? Conduct surveys or get an informal feet-on-the-street view of what’s really happening.  You may want to walk around and check out the kitchens or break rooms. Are the answers to the latest compliance elearning assessment posted on the fridge for all to share?  The message here is that this elearning is just a box to tick rather than an activity with any actual value—or any connection to improving any one’s performance.  Ask people what they think.  If they’re really being honest, you might get responses that will take your breath away:  "You’re the CBT Lady!" While you’re on this fact finding mission, find out what people really value in a learning experience and find out if your organization is providing that. If not, how? Ask people how they like to learn on their own time.  Ask people what you could offer them to help them do their jobs better.Find ways to provide support and tools that give people what they need and when they need it.  Can you embed performance support tools and job aids into the work flow? Can you use social business tools to connect people directly to the experts in your organization or provide a platform for asking questions and sharing knowledge, information and best practices?Look at your data and see what you can uncover.  I heard a story of an organization that developed an award winning elearning program with game-like features and goal-based scenarios.  They got lots of hits and uptake from their European and Asian audiences—an unexpected outcome—while the intended American audience stayed away in droves.  Why was that? And then why was this organization now designing a very similar program for their American audience? Do we ever learn?I’m raising questions here and not providing a lot of solutions, I realize. But the point is to live the questions first.  Find out what people really think of all of the effort you and your team create.  Then ask the question, "is that the kind of work you want to stand by?" Stop being the CBT Lady, I beg you.  And then let’s all go out and find better ways together.

StarCraft, a real-time strategy game developed by Blizzard Entertainment, has been labeled by many of its participants as the chess of the twenty-first century. A report published by the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub has interesting findings about this addictive game. By examining the StarCraft II community from both player and developer perspectives, the understanding of the... Read More ›

There are all kinds of emergencies out there that we can prepare for. Take a zombie apocalypse for example. That’s right, I said z-o-m-b-i-e a-p-o-c-a-l-y-p-s-e. You may laugh now, but when it happens you’ll be happy you read this, and hey, maybe you’ll even learn a thing or two about how to prepare for a real emergency.To learn more about what CDC does to prepare for and respond to emergencies of all kinds, visit:http://emergency.cdc.gov/cdc/orgs_progs.aspTo learn more about how you can prepare for and stay safe during an emergency visit:http://emergency.cdc.gov/

Second part of our summer update is a brand new courses calendar for educators and students that will help to keep track of your busy schedule during new study year. Performance and Accessibility Improvements It is completely rebuild from ground up … Continue reading →

photo courtesy Jack AllanPaul C's GPS theme for July is simple: "reflect upon a time when nature provided you with comfort, beauty, or inspiration."In the centre of North Island, New Zealand, rests one of the world’s largest extinct volcanoes. About 26,500 years ago, the volcano erupted, ejecting over 1,170 cubic kilometres of material.Over time, a series of smaller eruptions occurred, including the Hatepe eruption in the year 180. It was the most violent eruption of any volcano in recorded history. What remained after that cataclysm was a caldera that filled with water to become what we now know as Lake Taupo.I visited Lake Taupo with my family in April 2004. We were privileged to stay at my wife’s aunt’s cottage on the northern shore of the lake, literally a stone’s throw from the waterside.One afternoon, while returning from a walk along the lake shore,I scribbled a dozen or so lines of verse. Here, after some minor tinkering, is the essence of what I wrote:TaupoThe land was green once more before the lakeWas deep, its contours filled too well to markA place by: layer upon layer of ash-cake.No bird looped near the waves that scoured the darkAnd sintered shore-line. Fire had signed its willAnd held its peace. And but for some releaseAt vents and fumaroles, the land was still,With Earth and Sky well set to take their ease.A crystal lake in a crystalline setting;A billion waves; a billion inheritors.No way is it a seeing and forgetting;Truly, it’s a beauty fit for royalty.Its enriched and well privileged visitorsStand in awe of Taupo, and bow in fealty!video and photos courtesy Jack AllanA Green Pen Society contribution

(Please bear with me. This has been percolating for a bit, and i'm airing it on a larger stage than I had originally intended.)I have been a few things in my life, but I really, really like being an instructional designer. I love the idea and practice of helping people learn better - to do better. This is pretty fortunate, as people are willing to pay me to make this happen. However, I've come across a problem with my feelings about instructional design: I find myself in quiet moments thinking that instructional design is the domain of a 'certain kind of person.'If you're reading this, I think you know who I'm talking about: the autodidact's handmaiden, the unapologetically pedantic, the learning architect. Those who love to to think about learning knowledge transfer performance support so much that they put books like Design for How People Learn and 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People on their pleasure reading lists. Those who get into internet arguments about Alton Brown's instructional method. Those who will cut you at the mention of 'learning styles'. You know, our kind of people.I love our kind of people. I love meeting them at conferences and online. Perhaps more than anything, I love meeting novice instructional designers who seem to have more sense than I did at their stage in the game. The idea that more of us can be made intentionally (rather than "accidentally", even if it seems that's how most of us got here) is really appealing.Which leads me back to my problem. In the last few years, the responsibility for helping budding intentional designers has crept up on me - an direct report here, a correspondence mentorship there. Pretty soon I really started thinking about what it means to have an ordered introduction to our industry. I also quickly found out that maybe not everyone who is serious about learning knowledge transfer performance support name drops Vygotsky. Maybe they just want to get things done and not meditate so much on the deep roots. (Also, it's possible that they just don't care that much about Alton Brown.) I'm learning that intentional designers like to worry about sensible things, like what tools they should learn to use and what learning theories are most applicable, or how they should really feel about ADDIE. This is bemusing for someone who didn't even know the term instructional design until after he had created two elearning courses for actual money. I started to think that maybe my real problem is that my idea of what an instructional designer should want might not have a lot to do with what an instructional designer has to do.So it is with this mental about-face that I started listening more closely to some voices who have been talking about a particular problem related to the creation of our kind of people - we don't have good ways to talk about what it is that we're supposed to be doing. Our kind of people are they way they are because they had to figure it all out and create tools and guides and strategies from scratch without the benefit of routines. The fact that they relished doing so...well, that's how you knew. But in the service of being intentional, maybe we can say that there's simply more romance than virtue in reinventing the wheel. This is where people like Susan Devlin and Julie Dirksen and Steve Flowers are advocating the most sensible way for us to help intentional designers: to put our experience and solutions into patterns of instructional design so that it's less of an educated guess as to which interventions to employ. Maybe we I need to spend more time leaning the ladder against the wall to scale the problem than worrying about making the kinds of people who would build their own ladders.I'm really excited about the idea of helping to create an instructional design pattern library. I think you should be, too. How do we get started? [Steve and Julie, this is your cue :) ]Craig Wiggins has been helping people create and manage learning experiences for the last 10 years. He is the eLearning Instructional Design Strategist for the Corporate Executive Board's Corporate Leadership Council, where he manages the creation of meaningful distance learning and performance solutions. Wiggins holds a B.A. in anthropology and an M.Ed. in curriculum development, and spends a lot of time thinking about how to sneak usability, accessibility, and proper task analysis into the mix. In his natural habitat, he is usually storyboarding on wall-sized whiteboards or pontificating on Google+.

"Learning Analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs." — from SOLAR (Society for Learning Analytics Research) There are several reading materials recommended here, they help frame this topic, and define terms and concepts.... Read More ›

Many of you have been asking how you can embed a Google Form to your Eliademy course. Here you have some simple step for step explanation on how you embed a form to your course. Create a Google Form and … Continue reading →