1.29.2008

Multimedia, Attention, Productivity, Visual, & Knowledge

The value of multimedia in learning - Patti Shank
Presenting instruction in multiple media can be more effective than doing it through a single medium (such as text), but what is important is combining media effectively, not merely adding media.

Profs compete for students' attention - c/net
Some teachers relished these new challenges, using new tools like smartboards to create interactive multimedia presentations, while others seemed stunned that their old methods no longer effectively reached their students.

The productivity paradox - c/net
Productivity growth has slowed since 2004, however, and nobody is sure why. One theory that may explain declining productivity growth has been advanced by McKinsey consultants, who believe that companies have finally cut the non-complex transactional positions that benefit from productivity-stimulating technology. All that's left are complicated and nuanced jobs requiring experience, expertise, judgment, interaction, and collaboration--or tacit knowledge.

According to Basex, a research firm focusing on the knowledge economy, interruptions from e-mail, cell phones, instant messaging, text messaging, and blogs eat up nearly 30 percent of each day; on an annualized basis, this represents a loss of 28 billion hours for the entire U.S. workforce, or a $588 billion cost to the American economy.

emaki.net - Neil Cohn
Visual language theory

Requirements: Knowledge and Understanding Tyner Blain
Understanding of any topic comes from combining knowledge with context via associative thinking. We gain knowledge empirically. We gain context through organization of information.

1.27.2008

Cursive or Typing, Certification, Analysis, Rapid Development, Virtual, & Generations Gaps

Touch Typing - Cursive Writing - Why? - eLearning Technology
Tony Karrer has stirred quite a discussion on whether schools should teach cursive or typing.

Free Book PDF Now Available - Performance-based Employee Qualification/Certification Systems - The Pursuing Performance Blog
The methods and approach described in the book is based primarily on 2 large successful consulting engagements planned and led by the authors for projects done by their consulting firm.

Analysis - Instructional Design
The Business Outcome or Business Linkage is used to spell out how a learning initiative supports the organization's initiatives, strategies, or goals.

Creating your own e-learning content: Doing the knowledge - Personnel Today
Rapid development is definitely here but people need to learn how and when to use it. They should ask 'does it need to be delivered quickly?' and, if so, 'why?'. 'Is it because we didn't plan things well enough?'.

Generation Gaps
Do generational differences matter in instructional design? by Thomas Reeves by Thomas Reeves (via E-BCNZer).

Growing Up Online by PBS (via Here We Go Again-Part 2).

2008 Job Outlook - Inside Training
In the wake of the sub-prime mortgage debacle, and with increasing talk of a possible recession, you may wonder what's ahead for your company.

Halo 3 Meets Second Life - Baseline
The U.S. Army enlists new virtual world video game to teach soldiers interpersonal skills and cultural awareness for combat environments like Iraq and Afganistan.

1.22.2008

Creative Thinking, Layering, Requirements, Collaboration, & Expectation Economy

Breakthrough Thinking from Inside the Box - ASTD
It is often better to have people think "inside the box" rather "outside the box." This strategy has the group leaders pose concrete questions and direct the process for answering those queries. The research found that many ideas were developed from responses to specific questions. To arrange the brainstorming process, you restrict the range of suitable ideas, then choose and customize questions accordingly, and conduct multiple brainstorming sessions. Note that there is a link in the article that directs you to "Breakthrough Thinking from Inside the Box" by Harvard Business Review. Includes a nine minute video.

Layering - Seth Godin
Here's what we used to do:
Create -> Edit -> Launch

Here's what happens now:
Create -> Launch -> Edit -> Launch -> repeat

Gathering Requirements -Training Magazine
Successful training programs don't just happen. They come from knowing exactly what the training must accomplish for the business, the department, and the individual.

Watching Collaboration as it Happens - Green Chameleon
Follow the flags around the world map as they track anonymous edits to Wikipedia in almost real-time. What would it be like to track edits and contributions to an intranet or corporate knowledge resource like this?

THE EXPECTATION ECONOMY - Trend Watching
If you're obsessed with what your direct competition is doing, you will always end up copying new concepts in your industry. Which means that, unless you're comfortable with being a 'smart follower', this is not going to unleash your innovative brilliance.

1.20.2008

eLearning, OJT, Judgement, Millennials, Global Workforce, & Innovation

How I build my eLearning courses - pipwerks
Most eLearning tools do not promote the creation of effective courses, do not promote web standards, and do not promote accessibility; they merely make cookie-cutter course development easier for technically inexperienced course developers.

Structured OJT - The Pursuing Performance Blog
When the HQ training folks could not produce the content fast enough for the 7 regional field groups (there were 3 people in the department who also had other taskings to attend to), the field (who had the analysis and design from the participation of their Master Performers in those phases of the effort) started developing their own content and HQ morphed into the library/archive of the content and their role evolved into one of gathering, disseminating and capturing all content changes as the field updated "their" content.

Absolute and relative judgement - Cognitive Edge
A report of an MIT research project which purports to show that ten American students found relative judgements hard, but absolute judgements easy. Ten recently arrived students from Asia had the reverse pattern. People from different cultures don't see the world differently, but they think differently about what they see.

Mentoring Millennials - Training Magazine
Employers across the country are bracing for the arrival of the Millennials, a generation of new workers born in or around 1982. The Millennials represent the largest, healthiest, and most cared for generation to ever enter the workforce. This also is a generation with very little real work experience.

Managing the Global Workforce - Business Week: Davos 2008
Today, global corporations are transforming themselves into "transnationals," moving work to the places with the talent to handle the job and the time to do it at the right cost. The threat of a U.S. recession only makes such efforts at lowering expenses and grabbing the best talent even more urgent.

Measuring Innovation in the 21st Century - Economy Advisory Committee
Innovation is the design, invention, development and/or implementation of new or altered products, services, processes, systems, organizational structures, or business models for the purpose of creating new value for customers and financial returns for the firm.

1.17.2008

Telecommuting, eLearning, Training to Rise, & Training to Fall

Study: Telecommuting makes work worse for non-telecommuters - ars technica
Managing the amount of time coworkers telecommute, having face-to-face interaction, and giving job autonomy can all potentially improve in-office coworkers' job satisfaction and company relationship.

E-Learning Is Dead. Long Live E-Learning! - CLO
One of the biggest challenges for most of this e-learning has been the lack of educational courseware that was designed on the basis of sound instructional-design principles. Massive numbers of e-learning courses were produced with technology-based "templates" for the Internet.

Salary and Compensation Report from The eLearning Guild - Learning Design and Performance Improvement
The eLearning Guild has released the 2008 report on salary and compensation for the the industry. On the whole, The eLearning Guild does some excellent research, but my one gripe is that sometimes they drill down so much that the data is not very useful.

Supervisory, Leadership, Diversity Training to Rise in 2008 - CLO
Both spending and staff time will be boosted in 2008 for supervisory, leadership and diversity training, according to an annual survey of more than 2,500 senior HR executives by Novations Group, a global consulting organization based in Boston.

However. . .

Learning in a Recession? - The Massie Center
Investments in learning systems and infrastructure can already be seen as getting tougher. There are two companies that were ready to sign a contract for a new LMS in January 2008, yet were told to hold off or cancel the contract. It was seen as a difficult time to be spending when the future of the economy is uncertain. Another CLO was told to shrink her staff by 40% in the next three months, in order to be seen as "tightening" the budget.

1.09.2008

Engagement, Libraries, Six Sigma, & Internet

Debunking Employee Engagement Myths - McBassi
There is a great deal of focus these days on employee engagement (and rightly so). There are two big problems, however, in the way that most organizations are measuring - and therefore managing - employee engagement.

The Well-Wired Use Libraries More - The New York Times
Library use is far more prevalent among people who have a broadband Internet connection at home or at work, according to a new study. The finding counters a decade-old assumption that libraries serve as a "bridge" for people who want to use the Internet, but have only dial-up connections, or no access at all.

Why Six Sigma Is on the Downslope - Tom Davenport
So what's the best alternative to Six Sigma for process improvement? Well, there really is no one alternative that's best for all processes and circumstances. Companies really need a combination of tools and approaches.

Where did the computer go? - Rough Type
Beneath the Web's familiar, page-like surface lay a set of powerful technologies, including sophisticated protocols for describing and transferring data. In the years ahead, more and more of the information-processing tasks that we rely on, at home and at work, will be handled by big data centers located out on the Internet.

1.07.2008

Big Think, Predictions, Technology, Word, Globalization, & Humanity

Creative Process -Big Think
Big Think makes its appearance today. Read the story behind it.

Google's Lunchtime Betting Game _ New York Times
Information is shared most easily and effectively among office neighbors, even at an Internet company where instant messaging and e-mail are generally preferred to face-to-face discussion.

Why Does Technology-Based Teaching Fail? - Mobile Learning
Alan Kay effectively translates his understanding of cognitive psychology and learning theory into new ideas for making computers easy to learn - and learn on.

An Interface of One's Own New York Times
Oh, Word. For 20 years, you have supported and tyrannized me. You have given me a skimpy Etch A Sketch on which to compose, a cramped spot on the sentence-assembly line.

Mapping Globalization - Princeton University and the University of Washington
A comprehensive definition of globalization: geographically expanding networks of transactions, where transactions may be of any type, and may have occurred at any time. This naturally supports a strongly historical perspective that includes trade, migration, transportation, communication, empires, and so on.

THE LISTENER - Seed
"A danger that the art of observation may be lost, and the richness of the human context ignored."

1.06.2008

Boundary-less Learning, Best of 2007, Closed Software, & Small World

The Future of the Future: Boundary-less living, working and learning - KM World
Competing in a billion-mind economy means totally rethinking how you live, work and learn. That applies to you as an individual as well as to the organizations to which you belong. In the enterprise of the future, living, working and learning environments are converging in an unprecedented way.

Your 10 Most Popular Posts of 2007 - The Rapid eLearning Blog

  • What Steve Jobs Can Teach You About Designing E-Learning
  • Warning: Using the Wrong Images Can Confuse Your Learners
  • 5 Ways Web 2.0 Can Make You a Better E-Learning Designer
  • What Everybody Ought to Know About Using PowerPoint for E-Learning
  • Little Known Ways to Create Your Own Graphics Using PowerPoint
Top Ten Best (and Worst) Communicators of 2007 - Create Your Communications Experience
This year's List of Top Communicators highlights the best (and worst) from business, politics, entertainment and sports.

Long Live Closed-Source Software! - Discovery Magazine
"Open wisdom-of-crowds software movements have become influential, but they haven't promoted the kind of radical creativity I love most in computer science. If anything, they've been hindrances." For a good response, see The innovation dilemma by 451 CAOS Theory.

Top 10 Posts of 2007 - Writers Gateway

  • E-learning Design Challenge Series - Designing a Game Based Course
  • Storyboard Templates in Instructional Designing
  • 8 Easy Steps to Create a Storyboard
  • Top 8 Reasons Why Captivate Rocks
  • Needs Analysis in Instructional Designing
Innovation Predictions 2008 - BusinessWeek
And the Big Idea for 2008? Stop competing against your competitors. Your traditional rivals aren't your biggest worry.

It's a Small World (with Big Training) - Training Magazine
These days, we're bombarded by articles that refer to China as the Awakening Dragon or the Next Frontier. The conventional wisdom is that China, with its vast population and resources, will become the mother lode of new customers and new products.