[Quotable] NetNewsWire, JotSpot, Git, Google, old Texas sayings, etc. - (37signals)

Major in learning

“It’s easy to educate for the routine, and hard to educate for the novel. Keep in mind that many required skills will change: developers today code in something called Python, but when I was in school C was all the rage. The need for reasoning, though, remains constant, so we believe in taking the most challenging courses in core disciplines: math, sciences, humanities.” Google’s advice to students

[Quotable] NetNewsWire, JotSpot, Git, Google, old Texas sayings, etc. - (37signals)

Great quote via 37Signals blog.  Google knows that new employees need to know how to learn and not just know a single technology. This is true for everyone now.  I've seen this, employees clinging to the technology that they worked so hard to become really good at.  It can be hard to make the shift when it is time.  In high school I learned T-Maker a word processing system that required that you know tags to format the document. I would have 20 years experience in it now had they just not made a better word processor.  Learn to learn.

Conference Themes of Defrag Applied to Learning

Sean Ammirati does a nice job summarizing 5 themes that surfaced during the Defrag Conference held in Denver. The themes are

1. The Attention Economy
2. Next-Level Discovery
3. Social Graph
4. User Centric Identity
5. Enterprise Customers

I've talked about attention before, but I continue to think it is an important topic for anyone working with education and training to consider. The idea of structured attention is interesting in that it refers to attention around physical things like books, music, and movies because they are popular and "easier for the computer to process".

A lot of education today is could also be thought about as structured attention, learning events like a semester long course or class, a webinar, or an online lesson. This is why the learning management systems managers courses and content and not learning. Learning, like attention, is not really something you can "manage" it is something you support, encourage, and reward.

Next-Level discovery is about filtering support (I am working on a post to address this in detail) for the "fire hose" of information that is being aimed at you through your email, aggregator, and social network. There are huge implications for learning here, probably "learner control" and "instructional design" being at the forefront.

The social graph is about the relationships that "loosely couple" the social network. Does your online social network map to your "real life" social network? Would a hierarchy within your social network improve communication? There are a lot of interesting things that will happen, particularly when relationships can be better mapped causing the trust of the connection to skyrocket. Then things will really start to get interesting.

Identity will always be a critical issue because it is really about trust. It's a no-brainer that trust supports learning.

Finally, the fifth theme, Enterprise Customers Arrive is an important theme because it is going to let a lot of you who want to implement these tools, will now have the support of management and the IT department, that will create a marketplace for new approaches and ideas. It will also allow a lot of people to overcome the idea that Facebook is for the kids. I personally don't get that attitude, but I know it is real.

Blogged with Flock

Shared with Flock - The Social Web Browser
http://www.flock.com

Creating Learning Objects on developing rapid Learning Content

Note: The following is a half-baked idea that I am trying to get worked out in my mind....

I am thinking of creating some learning objects on creating rapid learning content. The course would be a self-paced, short series on the what, when, and how of creating rapid learning content. I was brainstorming the course outline and thought I would reach out to the blogesphere to see if anyone had and feedback on the outline. At this point I am not even sure that the terms "rapid learning content" or "rapid elearning" or rapid response training" are appropriate, or interchangeable, or what... (I said it was half-baked). But I would like to create a training session that would allow trainers or teachers to think about when they would use a tool like Zoho Show, VoiceThread or Viddler vs using a more elaborate content development tool like Authorware or Flash.

I am completely sure that this outline will dramatically change, but here it is for your comments and ideas. Thanks!

Possible Content Outline:

Course Title: Developing Rapid Learning Content

First Topic: What is rapid learning content?

What is rapid learning content?
A brief history of elearning content development?
Is rapid learning content "Good"?

Second Topic: When to use rapid learning Content?

When do you chose to create rapid learning content?
When do you never use rapid learning content?

Third Topic: How do you create rapid learning content?

What tools are currently available for creating rapid learning content?
When do you add interactivity or assessment?
What about accountability of rapid learning content?

Fourth Topic: How does rapid learning content fit into your training Strategy?

When is it effective compared to when is it not effective?

Using a blog to Learn

I think that having a blog is a great learning tool. It really helps you pull together your thoughts and ideas on a particular topic. Once your blog has an audience, you then start to learn from your audience. I personally get very little feedback on this blog, but yet it has really helped me understand a lot about engaging in a conversation that is distributed over the Internet.

If you are interested in improving your knowledge and understanding on any topic, start a blog and start writing about that topic. Where to start? Try Blogger.

The other great benefit is being able to go back and look at your ideas and thoughts at that time. I just went back through and cleaned up some of my posts from the last three years. It was great to see all the topics and ideas that I was interested in during that time.

Between Formal and Informal

Clark addressed one of the questions that I raised in my DIY post. I kind of like the way Clark puts informal learning

"...informal learning is about putting resources out there for the folks who are beyond courses, but are not yet ready to be creating their own resources."

I am interpreting this to mean the he sees a large number of people not quite to "DIY" at a creation level, but are really wanting to "repurpose" or "reuse" content, data, in a variety of formats to have as part of their own conversations. So just as Robin Good does with all his posts, make the content available in ever possible format and be proud that the learners only take what they want.

Top Six Mashups for Learning

I posted about learning mashups back in November and with the release of Yahoo pipes, the topic is being discussed again. For those of you who may not know, a mashup is typically a site that pulls together separate data sets, usually from other web sites, and delivers them together in a new way. There are many examples of these sites all over the web. There has been some backlash on the term "mashup" but I don't mind the term at all. I think because it is a great description of what is happening on these sites.

So what are some examples of mashups in elearning? I decided to list the top (turned out to be six) mashups of learning.

1. Personal learning goals mashedup with related content on the web.
2. Personal learning goals mashedup with experiences of domain experts.
3. Clearly defined competencies mashedup with related content on the web.
4. Clearly defined competencies mashedup with experiences of domain experts.
5. Activities you do at work (workflow) mashedup with related content on the web.
6. Activities you do at work (workflow) mashedup with experiences of domain experts.

After writing this it feels really formal. When I say related content, think articles, references, and more formal productions. When I say expereinces, think blog posts, podcasts, and conversations.

What do you think?

Social Learning: Inherent to the web or requires some added structure?

So a lot of the latest on the web in my mind is about bring together people around cool ideas with a critical role for cool tools to facilitate the process. I have spent some time recently thinking about how to empower both learners (basically anyone) and coaches (trainers, mentors, teachers, anyone who wants to help others improve). One key thought has been around the social aspect of learning. I am still trying to understand if the web "is" the social network or do we have to create more intuitive environments for learners to engage with like-minded peers.

We have actually spent more then just time thinking about the concept, we created LearningFlow. It currently has almost 90 learners signed in, but I will admit that we still need to a tremendous amount of work on the site to make it better, but it empowers learners to identify their own learning, join with peers, and identify resources.

So the question that I have now is, do we need MySpace, FaceBook, LearningFlow, 43things, or ELGG to bring us together? Or is the web simply enough? Is there formal vs. informal concepts at play?

If you think about traditional "schools" in the physical world, everyone knows that the buildings are critical to the process of bring people together for a common goal, but we also know that they tend to limit engagement with a broad world and require simulations of the "real world" to provide context. Is this true of the virtual world? Do we need both?

So to get this to where I am thinking about how to design our new learning tools and environment, does the next generation, elearning tool set need to have a "social networking" front end? or are they just individually open for anyone to adopt and integrate into an existing web environment? or do we need both?

LC: The Big Question

Learning Circuits' big question for February is 'what questions should we be asking?'. I don't like this one, but here goes.

1. How can we make the assessment of learning really, really easy?
2. How can we create a networked user environment that enables a learner to grab just the right thing (knowledge, experience, conversation, simulaton ) that gives them what they need?
3. How can we really start to use all the existing data that we already have about learners to improve their learning quest?

I guess these are a few questions I think we should be asking.