Podcasts are a convenient way to learn on the run and they are fairly easy to create. So why aren't you podcasting?Post from: The eLearning CoachUsing Podcasts For Learning-Updated

Command and control is out. Open and collaborative is in. Find out why.Post from: The eLearning CoachELC008: Creating A Connected And Engaged Organization

The post Video of the Week: The Learning Designer Project appeared first on Designed For Learning.

Think like a journalist for a compelling approach.Post from: The eLearning Coach5 Journalism Techniques To Borrow For eLearning

Well I made it to BETT this year by staying over in London after Learning Technologies. I had hopes that the new Learning at Work specialist conference thread would be useful but on the day I was there it was poorly attended and both sessions that I went to had little to do with learning technologies. The whole thing felt like a last minute add-on to try and attract some corporate L&D people. It’s a pity I missed Day 1 because both Nick Shackleton-Jones and Steve Wheeler were speaking - I’m guessing they drew a bigger crowd! The show itself was massive - probably four times the size of learning technologies but of course there are a lot of schools and colleges buying a lot of IT kit in the UK. The big hardware vendors were there including Apple, Dell, Acer and Samsung plus specialist PC education suppliers such as RM and Viglen. Microsoft and Google were also there promoting their education software and services. As I’ve noted before BETT is about technology in the classroom. It’s main audience are teachers in primary and secondary schools. For this audience online learning is something that isn’t going to happen in their schools anytime soon. Having said that there were a number of VLE vendors but it most cases the VLE simply provides an extension of the classroom experience. Children can access homework tasks, do some research, complete a quiz while parents can monitor their child’s progress. Moodle was on show by Webanywhere and the good guys at Synergy Learning but it’s used once again to extend the classroom rather than replace it. There is of course lots of fun stuff at BETT - programmable Lego, cool physics experiments and all sorts of learning games designed to be used in a classroom environment. There are also stacks of interactive whiteboard vendors and people who make charging and security trolleys for iPads that can be rolled from class to class. Is BETT changing? In the education market is the technology finally breaking out of the classroom? Only very slowly. The post BETT Show 2013 appeared first on Designed For Learning.

No straight line from point A to point B.Post from: The eLearning Coach10 Things You Should Know About Design and Design Thinking

I popped into PC World  yesterday evening after a client meeting in Plymouth. PC World is now the only physical PC superstore in the UK since the loss of Comet in January. I wanted to check out a Windows 8 laptop, and in particular a touch screen one. Why have a touch screen on a laptop? Good question and one that I have been grappling with as the time has come to upgrade my travelling office which currently comprises: Dell Studio laptop with a super high resolution 15.6 inch  screen running Windows Vista (nice PC but weighs a ton) Acer AspireOne Netbook with a high resolution 11 inch screen running Vista very slowly (but it lasts 8 hours on a charge and is super compact) iPad (the original one that I won at an E-Learning Network event back in 2010) iPhone 4 So back to that touch screen question. Steve Jobs (my eulogy here) said that they would never catch-on. His view was that no one will find using a touch screen in an upright position comfortable. You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those things are probably not gonna be pleasing to the user. Tim Cook from Apple on convertible tablet PCs Well I’ve been playing and I’ve come to the conclusion that a touch screen really adds to the laptop experience. In fact since I’ve been using an iPhone and iPad I am now in the habit of touching ALL screens just to see if they respond or not! I had great fun in PC World seeing if the the laptops on display would respond to my delicate touch. Not many responded but the ones that did were a revelation. So many things we need to do are just better done with a touch gesture. Accessing photos was magical. So were a lot of scroll and zooming actions. Interacting with e-mail and calendars and tasks was also really intuitive. Obviously I was limited in what I could achieve on the demo machines in the store but overall having a touch screen seems like the way to go - especially for tablet junkies. The only downside is that it has to be a Windows PC. Touch screens are a glaring omission from Apple’s line-up. Will this change now that Steve Jobs has gone? I think it probably might. See also: Surprisingly, touchscreen laptops don’t suck Here is my fave touch screen PC from my visit to PC World - the Asus VivoBook S400CA 14-inch at only £599 The post Touching your Device Screen appeared first on Designed For Learning.

You can learn how to make better explanations from Lee LeFever of Common Craft Videos.Post from: The eLearning CoachELC 009: How To Make Better Explanations

Find out how to use Twitter for informal learning.Post from: The eLearning Coach10 Ways to Learn From Twitter

Earlier this month I attended a TEDx for the first time at the University of Exeter. I was underwhelmed. It wasn’t the speakers - they were inspirational in all sorts of ways - but the format. First of all the theatre venue was quite depressing - dark with the audience in full auditorium style. Great for packing people in but poor for audience interaction. The lack of natural light was also a problem. Ideas are much better shared under sustainable natural light. It seems that most TED events happen in the dark - maybe it’s to do with the fact that everything is videoed for putting on the web. Each speaker speaks for 18 mins, they share some slides (it seems important that they stand in the red spot), the audience claps and if the talk is really good there is a standing ovation (we had a couple of those). There is no opportunity to ask the speakers any questions at the end and therein lies the big issue with the TEDx format - apart from the clapping there is no audience interaction all. Zilch. I left early. This is my audience interaction. To finish on a positive note I was inspired by: Matt Harper’s poetry Tom Crompton on the ‘The Conscience Economy’ Kirsty Schneeberger’s Question - ‘How old will you be in 2050?’ The TR14ers’ dancing Keister Brewin’s celebration of pirates More: http://tedxexeter.com/events/tedxexeter-2013/ Next year I might give TEDx a miss. Update 23 April: Over the years I have attended hundreds of conferences and though in the main I have found them positive, sometimes I come away feeling that the real beneficiaries are the organisers and the sponsors (and even these stakeholders struggle to get value sometimes). For a conference to be successful it needs to balance the needs of many stakeholders and this is always a challenge. I’ve been contributing to a collaborative effort (based in the Westcountry) on re-designing the conference - "How do you design the Ultimate Conference Experience?"   I’ve also attended a couple of ‘Unconferences‘ based on Open Space technology. Clearly the Unconference is quite a radical disruptive approach and I can’t see many professional conference organisers going down this route any time soon but maybe it’s time to at least introduce some ‘ideas worth spreading’ into the conference format. I’ll leave the last word to TED. TED isn’t a typical conference. The TED audience has high expectations of the speakers; the TED speaker team works with speakers well in advance of the conference to help shape a presentation that will succeed on the TED stage. TED is the place to give the talk of your life. The post TEDx Exeter, 12 April 2013 appeared first on Designed For Learning.

Three books that provide a fascinating look at the the brain and neuroscience.Post from: The eLearning CoachThree Brainy Books Reviewed

You can design and create information graphics to improve learning experiences. Listen in.Post from: The eLearning CoachELC 010: How To Design Real (Not Fake) Information Graphics

I’m guessing that I’m probably the first person to connect these two terms in a single blog post (but hey I may be wrong). I’m not doing it for effect, aware as I am of the concept that sex sells. I’m doing it because I’ve just finished reading ‘The Essential Difference‘ by Simon Baron-Cohen which describes the two fundamentally different ways in which male and female brains operate.  Simon Baron-Cohen is a Professor at Cambridge University in the fields of psychology and psychiatry. His book is based on based on years of research and specifically research into Autism, and as one of the quotes says: This no Mars/Venus whimsy, but the conclusion from twenty years of experiment. The tenet of the book is that men have brains that are wired for systemizing while women have brains that are wired for empathising. Empathizing is the drive to identify another persons emotions and thoughts, and to respond to them with an appropriate emotion. Empathizing occurs when we feel an appropriate emotional reaction, an emotion triggered by the other person’s emotion, and is done in order to understand another person, to predict their behaviour, and to connect and resonate with them emotionally. Systemizing is the drive to analyse, explore and construct a system. The systemizer intuitively figures out how things work, or extracts the underlying rules that govern the behaviour of a system. This is done in order to understand and predict the system, or to invent a new one. To illustrate this imagine you are in a bookshop in the business section and are looking for a book on starting up a new business. Which of these two titles would you choose? ‘Start-up on a Shoestring’ Learn how to get your idea off the ground by hearing the stories of 10 successful entrepreneurs. See what worked for them and learn from their (frequent) mistakes. ‘The Superfast Start-up Model’ Avoid the classic mistakes and take your start-up from creation to sale in just three years using our tried and tested system. Prefer option A; then you are an empathiser. Prefer Option B; then you are a systemizer. If you chose the wrong one for your sex then don’t worry. Men can be good empathisers and women can be good systemizers too! I think it’s clear that men and women do think differently in some fundamental ways. 200,000 years of evolution hints at why this is the case and relatively recent cultural advances can’t change that behaviour easily. Of course the differences aren’t black and white but an infinite variety of shades of grey. Simon Baron-Cohen is clear about the fact that not all men tend towards systemization or that all women tend toward empathy - it’s just that in general men are more tuned to systems (things) while women are more tuned to empathy (people). In practice we probably all lie along a continuum and the distribution along that continuum follows a normal curve. So if men and women’s brains are wired slightly different how might this shape how they learn? In developing hundreds of e-learning programmes no client has ever asked me to design differently for a male or female audience. If we go along with the empathiser/systemizer concept, and the idea that there is an essential difference how might this affect our learning design? Learning for Systemizers The focus would be on underlying patterns and abstract concepts. Systemizers love models, graphics, charts and mind maps. They want to see the big picture and how each piece fits into the overall whole. For a systemizer learning is about solving the puzzle and putting all the component pieces in their appropriate places. Learning for Empathisers The focus is on outcomes and emotions. Stories and case studies are key to relate the learning to the real world. Empathizers prefer scenarios and dialogue type interactions. They like to identify with others and see the situation from their perspective. In practice our audience is likely to have elements of both depending upon where they lie on the continuum so we probably need to balance the two types of learning activities to engage as wide an audience as possible. This is largely how we cater for different learning styles in e-learning. Since I’ve finished the book I’ve enjoyed applying an essential difference lens to various aspects of everyday life. From interacting with the satnav to catching up on the news or simply giving advice to your partner it’s amazing how we oscillate between systems and empathy in the course of our everyday lives. I’m wired as a systemizer - I instinctively knew that as I read the book but afterwards I took the SQ and EQ tests and came out with the following results: Systemizing Quotient - 52 (way above average for a man, very high ability for analysing and exploring a system) Empathy Quotient - 40 (about average for a man) I came out as a strong systemizer but over the years I’ve recognised the value of empathy and have learned to be more people-centric in my work. It takes a bit of practice to re-wire our evolutionary brains but the result is a much more rounded view of the world. More stuff here: Guardian Article on ‘The Essential Difference‘ Take the Systemizer Test (SQ) Take the Empathy Test (EQ) Simon Baron-Cohen’s ‘The Essential Difference’ book on Amazon The post E-learning and Sex appeared first on Designed For Learning.

Ten sets of ten freebies for you: graphics, audio, media tools, etc.Post from: The eLearning Coach100 Hand-picked Freebies for eLearning Designers

Video is becoming increasingly popular in e-learning. It’s an engaging medium and one that everyone is familiar with considering we spend so much time in front of our TVs and our multimedia devices. Video is also mobile device friendly - videos will run on pretty much all devices and are particularly suited to smartphones with a reasonable size screen. But can you actually learn from watching a video or a documentary on TV? (For more on this : Can you learn from watching a video? ). This video from the Open University teaches us about how the economy works (or doesn’t); pretty topical I think. It also uses humour - something which is sadly lacking from most e-learning programmes (but don’t blame me - clients almost always remove any that I try to sneak in). The post Video of the Week: The OU on Economics appeared first on Designed For Learning.

Common issues eLearning designers and developers face and how to overcome them.Post from: The eLearning CoachELC 011: eLearning Design Challenges And Solutions

This post follows on from the post on ‘Social Learning and Knowledge Management‘ which compared both approaches on the assumption that they are attempting to achieve the same outcome - people in organisations sharing their knowledge, and learning from each other in order to improve performance. In the L&D world social learning has become a bit of a fashionable fad. It’s not hard to see why. With increasing pressure to do more for less, and with the improved adoption of learning technologies the conventional formal classroom approach to learning feels a little outdated and is very much top down rather than bottom up. Social and informal learning based on the 70:20:10 idea and utilising some cool social media technologies seems like a no brainer for our 21st century digitally connected workforce. But though it appears pretty straightforward, getting learners to learn informally from each other (and let’s face it they are probably doing that already) opens up a Pandoras box of challenges for the organisation in general and for L&D in particular. Knowledge management (KM) people often talked about knowledge management being an oxymoron. Knowledge was by its very nature difficult to tie down - explicit knowledge was tricky to codify and tacit knowledge was even more elusive. It’s true that managing an organisations knowledge was a big ask but in my view KM failed for more pragmatic reasons and those reasons are key for us to be aware of if we are going to have a chance of making social learning work. Here are nine things we need to address if we are going to have any chance of making social learning work. 1. KM was time consuming KM required time and sometimes substantial effort on the part of those people who owned the really useful knowledge. KM was time away from the ‘real work’ and KM activities always looked bad on your time sheet. 2. KM suffered from a poor reward and recognition framework In the early days there was substantial support and encouragement to invest time and to share stuff but once people realised that sharing wasn’t good for them personally all that altruism slowly drained away. 3. Many more people took rather than gave In practice KM involved knowledgeable people (usually the experts) sharing stuff with less knowledgeable people. Most people realised it was easier to take rather than give. A few underwent the pain while the mass got the gain but this imbalance was unsustainable and the experts soon stopped sharing.   4. KM was technology driven KM was hijacked by ‘big IT’ and the vendors sold a misguided vision of a knowledge sharing utopia. You can imagine how it goes: ‘Buy our system and KM will be sorted in your organisation.’ Of course they were wrong. KM needed much more than a re-packaged document management system to succeed. 5. KM was encouraged and facilitated by a dedicated team Most organisations employed people to support and encourage knowledge sharing (I was one of them). The idea was that these people would act as the catalyst for others to participate and that KM would then grow organically. However once KM lost its initial shine and failed to deliver on its early promises the KM teams were quietly axed. The reason often given was that ‘KM was now embedded in the business’. 6. KM wasn’t embedded in the business In practice KM was never really embedded in the business and the KM team was seen as a sort of annoyance that could be dropped when appropriate (not unlike the position that L&D finds itself today). 7. The technology wasn’t up to the job In 2000 we didn’t have social media. We hardly had a satisfactorily functioning internet. KM systems were primarily about information and document storage, and search. In an effort to connect knowledgeable people within large organisations they also included people profiles and discussion forums which were used by communities of practice (COPs) and communities of interest (COIs). The idea was that if you couldn’t find the answer in the knowledge base you could contact someone who could help, or ask a question in an appropriate community forum. 8. KM focused on explicit not tacit Paradoxically KM focussed on the explicit (the know what) where there was least value, rather than the tacit (the know how and why) where the value was much greater. Explicit knowledge can of course be valuable - especially to novices - but the really valuable insightful stuff tends to stay locked up in expert’s heads. 9. Sometimes the knowledge within the organisation is not enough Sometimes you need fresh thinking. Connecting your experts may simply result in more of the same or similar solutions. Sharing beyond the silos and boundaries of the organisation can be so much more valuable that sharing within. In the third and final post, ‘How social learning can work‘,  I’ll explore some of the ways we can address these challenges and get social learning working for us. The post Why social learning won’t work appeared first on Designed For Learning.

Try this idea for your next eLearning design.Post from: The eLearning CoachCreate A Metro Style Design For eLearning

The new Articulate Studio Pro '13 borrows some best features from Storyline.Post from: The eLearning Coach10 New Features You’ll Love In Articulate Studio ’13

Couldn’t resist sharing the ‘Adventures of Story Lion’ series of short tutorials on Articulate Storyline by Articulate Superhero Bruce Graham. Just shows what can be achieved using a rapid e-learning tool by mixing a little imagination with some playful humour. The illustrations are by Laura (www.veryvermilion.co.uk). Episode 1 - Using Markers in Storyline Episode 2 - Using Lightboxes in Storyline Episode 3 - Using States in Storyline Episode 4 - Using Video in Storyline Enjoy! The post The Adventures of Story Lion appeared first on Designed For Learning.

Best techniques, practices and tools for content curation, a skill for the 21st century.Post from: The eLearning CoachELC 012: Content Curation For Learning

The e-learning industry is currently engaged in a mad rush to get their stuff to work on mobile devices (smartphones and tablets). This rush is driven primarily by clients who can be a little naive when it comes to the tricky technical bits (think of those car buyers who are never interested in looking under the bonnet). For many projects we get a reasonably sensible brief but then tacked on the end is the request that the e-learning also has to be ‘accessible on mobile devices’. Now, in the words of software development, this is ‘non-trivial’ - there are many challenges to developing e-learning that works across the vast number of mobile devices. However, one of the key challenges is not actually technical at all. It’s about device ownership - because in the majority of cases the mobile devices that learners will be expected to use to access their work based learning are their own personal devices. These are devices that they have purchased and for which they pay all the bandwidth usage costs. This simple fact can throw a big spanner in the works for any roll-out of work based learning on mobile devices. The simple solution of course is a ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) policy and here’s a really useful infographic that explores the pros and cons of BYOD. "BYOD has freed up many enterprises from the responsibility of exclusively purchasing and maintaining computing devices, such as notebooks, tablets and smartphones, but companies still need to have policies set in place to make things work." Infographic from http://www.biztechmagazine.com The post BYOD for e-Learning appeared first on Designed For Learning.

Explore what a learning on demand system could do for the world of learning and development.Post from: The eLearning CoachLearning On Demand: How the Evolution of Technology is Shaping the Future of Learning

In the e-learning business we are increasingly hearing the mantra, "Resources not courses." It sounds simple - replace courses with resources that are accessible at the point of need to deliver seamless just-in-time learning. In some circumstances it can be a good strategy, and when it comes to mobile devices resources are much simpler to access than courses, but before we get too carried away with this idea let’s take a deeper look at the difference between a resource and a course. A resource is a piece of information covering a specific topic or sub-topic. It could be a document, an article, a blog post, an image, a video or an infographic. Some resources may be fairly comprehensive (e.g. a 10 page PDF guide to Project Management) while some might be fairly simple (e.g. an image showing the project lifecycle). Most resources are indexable by search engines though additional metadata may need to be supplied for images and videos. This makes them easy to find in a hurry. Resources are normally discrete and unconnected. There might be a collection of resources relating to a specific theme (e.g. Project Management) but it’s up to users to make the connections and to infer meaning from a resource collection. A course moves things up a gear or two. It differs from a resource in that it has been developed using pedagogical principles. What does the pedagogical approach add? The course designer has identified the areas where understanding is weak and developed strategies to overcome these blocks to understanding. The course designer uses a range of instructional techniques to overcome these issues ranging from metaphor, analogy, stories, visual aids and learning scaffolds. They then check that the material is understood though practice, questioning and reflection. Some of the best resources are almost like courses while some of the worst courses are almost like resources but it’s important to recognise the role of each as part of a hollistic approach to learning. There is a lot of value in sharing and using resources (like this blog post) but added value comes from either collecting resources together under a common theme or curating resources to create a narrative journey through a specific topic. To add further value those resources can be developed into a course complete with the whole gamut of instructional approaches and techniques. Each approach has its own strengths and weaknesses but it’s important to remember that they aren’t always interchangeable.   The post Resources or Courses? appeared first on Designed For Learning.