7.26.2007

Second Life, mLearning, Feedback, & eLearning

How Madison Avenue Is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life - Wired
Ever since BusinessWeek ran a breathless cover story titled "My Virtual Life" more than a year ago, reporters have been heralding Second Life as the here-and-now incarnation of the fictional Metaverse that Neal Stephenson conjured up 15 years ago in Snow Crash.

Mobile Learning - The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning
Vol 8, No 2 (2007).

Workplace Coach: There is a skill in delivering critical feedback - Seattle PI
Regrettably, there are people who equate offering feedback as license to criticize or judge. When feedback sounds like a personal attack ("you are rude/out of control"), most people will take it personally and respond defensively. Once in defensive mode, people can't hear anything else you are saying.

Can You e-Learn at Your Desk? - Breakthrough eLearning
Some eLearning is clearly meant to be accessed on-demand, as needed, at the desk. However, I really do not think that learning that requires a great deal of thinking, reflection, discussion, and competency development works while you are trying to squeeze it in among phone calls, reading and responding to emails, and having chats with whomever happens to come by your desk. Related article - Understanding E-Learning 2.0 By Tony Karrer.

7.21.2007

Web 2.0, Blogs, Steve Jobs, & Memes

Why We're Like a Million Monkeys on Treadmills - Micro Persuasion
Channels are where the action is at. However, it's important to remember they are just that - and they change. Circa 1998, perhaps when many of you were 10, The Globe.com, GeoCities and Tripod were all the rage. They faded from our horizon over time. The same thing will happen to many of today's hot sites. In fact, I advise marketers not to invest too much time in creating "a Facebook strategy" as much as they don't have "an NBC strategy" or "a New York Times strategy." Instead, I encourage them to people watch, learn and then plan based on their audience and the big picture.

The Next Big Thing: Why Web 2.0 Isn't Enough - Tech Consumer
So the latest 'big thing' has been the socializing of the Internet. We now find sites like Digg, reddit, Del.icio.us, etc. that help us wade through all the rough to find the diamond. The buzz word surrounding all of this has been 'Web 2.0'. This socializing has gone a long way to making sense of it all, but is there more? What is the next big thing? Realtors have been giving us the answer for years, although they didn't know it. The next big thing is. . . 'location, location, location'.

Learning from Dave Winer - Joel on Softweare
I don't know how many times I've read a brilliant article someone wrote on a blog. By the end of the article, I'm excited, I'm impressed, it was a great article. And then you get the dribble of morbid, meaningless, thoughtless comments. If other people disagree, they're welcome to do so... on their own blogs, where they have to take ownership of their words.

Steve Jobs' Greatest Presentation - Business Week
After watching and analyzing Job's presentation, I thought about five ways to distill Jobs' speaking techniques to help anyone craft and deliver a persuasive pitch.

Ants, terrorism, and the awesome power of memes - TED Talks
Starting with the deceptively simple story of an ant, Dan Dennett unleashes a dazzling sequence of ideas, making a powerful case for the existence of "memes" -- a term coined by Richard Dawkins for mental concepts that are literally alive and capable of spreading from brain to brain.

7.15.2007

AARs, Innovation, & Blended Learning

After-action Reviews - Kent Blumberg
The point of routine AARs is to capture lessons learned from each project, find ways to improve future performance, implement those improvements in your own area, and transfer the lessons to other parts of your organization.

Users are transforming innovation - Financial Times
Academic researchers are rapidly converging on the notion that the most effective form of user-centred innovation involves design collaborations among many, widely distributed contributors via the internet.

Blended Delivery: Mixing Modalities - Chief Learning Officer
Blended learning used to refer to the different teaching styles used inside the classroom. Today, with the introduction of synchronous and asynchronous learning, the term now refers to the range of delivery options available to learning professionals, including classroom-based, instructor-led training (ILT), synchronous or asynchronous e-learning, portable technologies and on-the-job training (OJT).

7.12.2007

eLearning, Social Sites, Web Design, & the Silent Revolution

E learning, web-based training, - whatever you call it, it's evolving - The Center for Workplace Excellence
What used to be just-in-case learning has become just in time, and in the future we can expect learning that is 'just-for-me.'

News the Crowd Can Use - Wired
The explosive growth of social editing or social news sites such as Digg.com, Newsvine.com and NewsTrust.net , has made a pressing issue of these debates about the virtues of an unedited public sphere and the control of information. That's because social editing web sites allow users to source, debate and prioritize content without intervention from an editorial staff.

Web Design-isms: 7 Surefire Styles that Work - Vitamin
Fashion is in one minute and out the next because we get bored of looking at the same things day after day. The same pattern will occur in web design. However, just as there are mainstays of good fashion, such as the little back dress, there are also mainstays of good web design.

Dramatic Impact: The Effect of "The Silent Revolution" - Change This
The world is not flat, nor is it round. It is indeed an interrelationship of sympathetic energy patterns. Our role is not to revolve, but to evolve, moving beyond the repetition of our previous motions, creating new visions to energize and missions to execute.

It's Time to Drop E-Learning - Training Zone
It's time to recognise that the 'e' carries the stigma of past hyperbole, puts some potential learners and managers off and smacks of a love of technology that has everything to do with content delivery, rather than individual learning.

7.10.2007

Knowledge, Blogging, & Costco

The half-life of knowledge and the shape of education - Principled Discovery
We may know more superficially, but this seems at the expense of actually understanding anything. And how are we of value if all we can do is connect with others? Each member of the network needs to possess an area of expertise, something to contribute to that network.

Write Articles, Not Blog Postings - Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox
Blog postings will always be commodity content: there's a limit to the value you can provide with a short comment on somebody else's comments. Such postings are good for generating controversy and short-term traffic, and they're definitely easy to write. But they don't build sustainable value.

How Costco Became the Anti-Wal-Mart - The New York Times
Not everyone is happy with Costco's business strategy. Some Wall Street analysts assert that Mr. Sinegal is overly generous not only to Costco's customers but to its workers as well.

7.04.2007

Coaching, Knowledge, Posts, iPhone, & Maps

Survey: Executive Coaching Sees Downturn - Chief Learning Officer
After years of increased use, executive coaching is seeing a downturn within corporations, according to a survey from Novations Group, a global consulting and training firm based in Boston.

More guidelines to improve your information literacy - Knowledge Jolt with Jack
We live in a sea of information, as Britannica's Web 2.0 Forum has made plain. Sometimes that sea is full of algal blooms. Sometimes there's raw sewage floating on it.

Internet Time Wiki - Internet Time Blog
What do you do when your best ideals are in the bottom of a reservoir? Blogs and feeds are a mighty flow of information. That flow feeds a reservoir that holds stocks of ideas worth keeping.

Flash Report: First Look at iPhone & Learning Perspectives - Eliott Masie
Elliott details the aspects of the iPhone that are high potential for learning (instructional videos, collaboration and more), some of the challenges (no current use of Flash Video) and a few trends in the mobile.

Google Maps Is Changing the Way We See the World - Wired
At first, the data all flowed one way, from the mapper to the user. But Paul Rademacher, a DreamWorks Animation programmer, changed that when he invented the map mashup. Today the power lies in the hands of the map makers. The only difference is that we're all mapmakers now, which means geography has entered the complex free-for-all of the information age, where ever-more-sophisticated technology is better able to reflect the world's rich, chaotic complexity.

7.01.2007

Informal Learning, Richard Feynman, Everthing, Web Colors, iPhone

Spiritual dimensions of informal learning - Mauro Cherubini's moleskine
Focus on the three primary learning strategies: mentoring, self-directed learning and dialogue. Explores how each of these strategies can facilitate spiritual development.

Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine - The Long Now Foundation
In retrospect I realize that in almost everything that we worked on together, we were both amateurs. In digital physics, neural networks, even parallel computing, we never really knew what we were doing. But the things that we studied were so new that no one else knew exactly what they were doing either. It was amateurs who made the progress.

Theory of Everything - Articlemotron
If we accept new data as accurate on its face, then we are unable to form a concept of the universe around us. New data would just replace old data. Let us use the analogy of a large jigsaw puzzle. By blindly accepting new data, we would never find a starting point. The jigsaw pieces could never relate to each other. Even though all the pieces would be on the card table, we would never be able to distinguish the edge pieces for the interior pieces.

Ultimate HTML Color HEX Code List - COLOURlovers
HTML 3.2 specifications identified sixteen colors that can be used by name to define color in HTML and CSS. But don't worry you can use more than sixteen colors in HTML. . . you'll just need to know the six character HEX values and they are all listed on one page.

A method to the iPhone madness? - c/net
The iPhone really could change the future of computing. It's quite possible that June 29, 2007, will one day be remembered as the day that the average consumer realized what mobile computing was all about. Or it could be marked as the day Apple overestimated its reach and watched its remarkable 10-year renaissance begin to wane.

Phone Launch, AT&T Vs. Apple Store - GIZMODO
A quite telling story about the difference in customer service between the two companies. Day one revealed what all Apple aficionados fear. That AT&T, through the depths of its incompetence, could derail the iPhone.