Training, mLearning, eLearning, Pay, & Blogs

Management in formation - People Management

Inside one of the buildings, you might have found the eminent leadership academic John Alban-Metcalfe. He's giving a lecture to an assemble "some of the worst examples of leadership can come at the top of organisations", and citing such sources as Charles Handy while proceeding to debunk the myth of the charismatic leader.

Breaking Down mLearning - mLearning Hub

At the highest level we can separate mLearning into learning applied to mobile devices inside the classroom and those outside the classroom. Please note I realize the simple fact that something that is mobile means it could easily move in or out of the "classroom", however there is an important distinction between the two. Also see, iPods for Learning.

Teaching in the digital world, part I: technology is not always your friend - Science Blogs

Teaching an on-line course turned out to be as much a learning experience for me as it was for my students. Now, it's time to step back and reflect on what was learned.

Six Dangerous Myths About Pay - Conde Nast

Portfolio Off-price clothing retailer Men's Wearhouse pays higher-than-average wages and invests extensively in training. These unusual moves let it reduce turnover and compete on customer service, superior product knowledge, and sales skills - advantages that rivals can't easily copy.

Beyond Blogs - Business Week

Workers can fritter away hours on YouTube. They can use social networks to pillory a colleague or leak secrets. That's the downside, and companies that don't adapt are sure to get lots of it.

But there's an upside to the loss of control. Ambitious workers use these tools to land new deals and to assemble global teams for collaborative projects. The potential for both better and worse is huge, and it's growing - and since 2005 the technologies involved extend far beyond blogs. So our first fix is to lose "blogs" from our headline. The revised title: "Social Media Will Change Your Business."

Video Games, mLearning, Activity Centered Design, & Web Users

Video games can make us creative if spark is right - e! Science News

Video games that energize players and induce a positive mood could also enhance creativity, according to media researchers. However, the study also finds that players who were not highly energized and had a negative mood, registered the highest creativity. "You need defocused attention for being creative," said S. Shyam Sundar, professor of film, video and media studies at Penn State. "When you have low arousal and are negative, you tend to focus on detail and become more analytical."

"The key is to generate emotion," explained Sundar. "Ideally, a good teacher can energize the class and make them much more emotionally invested through presentations, guest lectures, and group discussions. Video games can help achieve that in an already simulated way."

Create Mobile Websites with Wirenode - Mobile Learning

Wirenode incorporates media and interactivity, which may even be uploaded by the user, and there's even an analytics tool for users who like to see how many visitors/students are checking out their mobile site.

Design - Human Centered Design vs Activity Centered Design? - eCube

The "listen to your users" produces incoherent designs. The "ignore your users" can produce horror stories, unless the person in charge has a clear vision or Conceptual Model for the product. The person in charge must follow that vision and not be afraid to ignore findings. Yes, listen to customers, but don't always do what they say.

Web users 'getting more selfish' - BBC

Instead of dawdling on websites many users want simply to reach a site quickly, complete a task and leave. Success rates measuring whether people achieve what they set out to do online are now about 75%, said Dr Nielsen. In 1999 this figure stood at 60%. The designs have become better but also users have become accustomed to that interactive environment.

Web users were also getting very frustrated with all the extras, such as widgets and applications, being added to sites to make them more friendly.

Checking out animoto

Blogging--It's Good for You - Scientific American

Scientists (and writers) have long known about the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings. But besides serving as a stress-coping mechanism, expressive writing produces many physiological benefits.

We're all Einsteins now - New Zealand Herald

The ability to think in abstract terms underpins the scientific, material and, arguably, moral advances of modern society.

Visual Architecture: The Rule of Three - Digital Web

Don't flame me, bro' - New Scientist

People can vastly overestimate their ability to communicate unambiguously by email in that we find it hard to take another person's perspective when communicating electronically. Similarly, a study found that people tend to interpret emails more negatively than other forms of communication, making them even more likely to respond aggressively.

Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain - New York Times

The aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit.

Adaptable Workforce, Manufacturing, & Paths vs Hierarchies,

Unlocking the DNA of the Adaptable Workforce - IBM (executive summary)

Click to enlarge

Developing the workforce is the prime ingredient for an organization's success.

"As any firm that has attempted to transform its workforce to meet changing conditions will attest, the journey is difficult and littered with obstacles. Understanding key workforce performance challenges and identifying the leading practices companies are using to overcome them have become central focus areas." - IBM

download the complete paper

Back to Basics - Metropolis

In our rush to build a knowledge economy we forgot that we need a backbone.

"Manufacturing is still more relevant to long-term economic development than glitzy museums or massive sports stadiums." - Joel Kotkin

Think about paths instead of hierarchies - Signal vs. Noise

While this short post is about web navigation, the same principles apply to all forms of knowledge in the learning and development field.

"Instead of thinking in terms of hierarchy or up-front structure, I think it's better to work with paths. A path is a line that goes from a starting point A to an accomplishment B." - Ryan

Development Ratio, mLearning, Change, & Feedback

Recent Survey shows 36:1 development ratio for ILT - Bryan Chapman

• Front-End Analysis (Data Collection, Working with SMEs) = 13% (4.8 hours)
• Instructional Design (Objectives, Outlining, Content Development) = 13% (4.6 hours)
• Lesson Plan Development = 11% (3.8 hours)
• Creation of handout material = 8% (3 hours)
• Student Guide Development = 20% (7.2 hours)
• PowerPoint Development = 21% (7.6 hours)
• Test and Exam Creation = 8% (2.8 hours)
• Other Tasks = 6% (2.3 hours

Mobile in 5 Paragraphs - Learnlets
Mobile learning is not about courses on a phone. mLearning is where we really bring home the message: 'It's not about learning... it's about doing", because while there are learning implications for mobile devices, it's really about performance support.

Can You Become a Creature of New Habits? - New York Times
Researchers in the late 1960s discovered that humans are born with the capacity to approach challenges in four primary ways: analytically, procedurally, relationally (or collaboratively) and innovatively.

What Behavior Do You Want to Change? - Business Week
When we began Nathaniel's exercise, our military friend chose: "When I become less judgmental. . ." as his behavior to change. I was skeptical about his sincerity and thought his participation in the exercise would be interesting to observe. True to my expectations, the first time around he coughed and grunted a sarcastic comment rather than talk about a real benefit.

Research Report on Feedback - Will at Work learning
This seminal research reviews how to give learners feedback, written in a way that puts feedback in perspective, that goes deep into the fundamentals to give readers clear mental models for how feedback works.

Cognitive Age, Training, Memory, Instructional Technologies, & Captcha

The Cognitive Age - New York Times
We're moving into a more demanding cognitive age. In order to thrive, people are compelled to become better at absorbing, processing and combining information. The globalization paradigm emphasizes the fact that information can now travel 15,000 miles in an instant. But the most important part of information's journey is the last few inches - the space between a person's eyes or ears and the various regions of the brain.

The globalization paradigm leads people to see economic development as a form of foreign policy, as a grand competition between nations and civilizations. These abstractions, called "the Chinese" or "the Indians," are doing this or that. But the cognitive age paradigm emphasizes psychology, culture and pedagogy - the specific processes that foster learning.

Is the grass greener on the other side of the pond? - Training Zone
We're fascinated by the American training scene. Is their training - particularly elearning - bigger, brasher, better? Neil Lasher reports that the USA is just as fascinated by what is happening here! So, is the grass greener on the other side of the pond?

Memory Training Shown to Turn Up Brainpower - New York Times
Although the control groups also made gains, presumably because they had practice with the fluid intelligence tests, improvement in the trained groups was substantially greater. Moreover, the longer they trained, the higher their scores were. All performers, from the weakest to the strongest, showed significant improvement.

Instructional Technologies in Human Resource Development: Impact, Models, and Changes - International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning
An introduction to instructional technologies that can be used in human resource development (HRD)

Study Suggests Math Teachers Scrap Balls and Slices - New York Times
The students who learned the math abstractly did well with figuring out the rules of the game. Those who had learned through examples performed little better than might be expected if they were simply guessing. The problem with the real-world examples, Dr. Kaminski said, was that they obscured the underlying math, and students were not able to transfer their knowledge to new problems.

We still believe there is human involvement - Nicholas Carr
"Captcha" is the official term for those wavy strings of numbers and letters that you have to decipher before setting up an online email account or gaining access to other types of web sites. The acronym, coined by someone at Yahoo a few years back, stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.