Archive for the 'XML and learning standards' category
New ideas for learning professionals and curious people …
eLearning 2.0 Technologies and Concepts: Some trends in personalized adaptive learning.
eLearning Technology: Thinking about social conference tool use and the low rate of participation for any collaborative software tool.
Read the rest of this entry »
Read comments (0)
No.
It’d be nice to give you better news, but the right answer is no.
You can’t always rely on user-generated content being good, promoting e-learning, or even being there at all. You can put up a great Web 2.0 tool, like a Wiki, and get nothing out of it but blank web pages.
Getting good, sustained, useful interactivity comes from setting a content baseline, having goals, and facilitating useful communication among users. Your users and employees don’t want to write for its own sake, they want to write to accomplish something.
Are they having a useful conversation or creating a reference they’re going to want to come back and use? Can they relate it to their every day tasks in a way that’s helpful, as opposed to adding extra, unwanted chores? Will they be able to reuse their content elsewhere?
Technology gets you learning tools. Engaged users give you learning communities. I think we all know which is more useful.
It all starts with the people, not the software.
From Seth Godin’s book, small is the new big:
… As we’ve turned human beings into competent components of the giant network known as American business, we’ve also erected huge barriers to change.
In fact, competence is the enemy of change!
Competent people resist change. Why? Because change threatens to make them less competent. And competent people like being competent. That’s who they are, and sometimes that’s all they’ve got. No wonder they’re not in a hurry to rock the boat. …
It’s easy to forget that learning new things and facing new challenges involves being, let’s face it, incompetent. That’s never fun. Remember when you were learning how to ride a bike? You were frustrated at first, you felt like a dolt, you had skinned knees and a bruise on your shin, you wondered if you’d ever be good at this, even though everyone told you you’d pick it up in no time.
Read the rest of this entry »
As everything moves online and becomes digitized, our computers and mobile devices take on more of the role of gatekeepers to our relationships with others.
Sometimes, this can make people nervous. Content management and communication technology is an increasing part of our personal conversations, our family lives, socialization with friends, every aspect of our work. It touches how our minds process what they sense. It’s easy to see why technology makes things like travel and construction better, but it isn’t always an unmixed blessing in the personal sphere.
In the learning experience, there can be natural, experience-based skepticism that more technology is the answer.
Read the rest of this entry »
