Xyleme Learning Blog

Weblogg-ed: Getting off paper.

Dave’s Whiteboard: Dave remembers Geary Rummler, who helped him get leaner in instructional design.

Informal Learning: A report from the DevLearn panel on eLearning research and its web 2.0 intersections.

Helge Scherlund’s eLearning News Blog: Online courses booming as the economy ramps down.

TravelinEdMan: An interview with Dr. Ellen Wagner, principal analyst at Sonoma LLP, before her keynote speech at this November’s E-Learn Conference in Las Vegas.

“My belief is that very few people go to work to do a bad job. I’d say that 98% of people who go to work want to do a great job.” - John Catlin, CEO, TACTICS Consulting

A portion of the November 6th webinar, Reusability 2.0: Simplifying Compliance Training, included a discussion between Catlin and panel host Cushing Anderson, VP of HR for IDC, on how to make it easy for employees to do their jobs well.

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the 6th Working/Learning blog carnival! Thanks very much to Dave Ferguson for kicking it off and letting us host it this time (more details and how you can host it, here,) and to all the very talented folks who’ve contributed the posts you’re about to enjoy. And we’re off …

• Ferguson writes about using training as a last resort after fully evaluating workflow and incentive structures so that it can be true performance support.
• Laurie Bartels writes about an expansive view of professional development that, as she quoted Elkhonon Goldberg saying, turns “neuroplasticity to your advantage.” Mmm, neuroplasticity.
• Karyn Romeis encourages people not to get so caught up in predetermined steps that they forget how much fun learning is and how much they can enjoy it.
• Ken Allan writes about the energy required for the learning process, and how it can be supplied by a teacher’s pedagogical and scaffolding techniques even for individualized elearning. And I’ve seen the truth of his conclusion in my own studies, that without the meta-cognition of what you’re building towards, as supplied by an instructor or a learner of a certain level, self-directed learning can lose focus quickly.
• Harold Jarche thinks that if mass marketing is dead, mass training will soon follow.
• Penny Ryder is interested in feedback about how to build links with her students’ parents so she can be a more effective instructor.

And … that’s it, everyone! I’ve had a great time reading through these contributions and would recommend hosting the carnival to anyone whose day is brightened when their inbox gets loaded with good reading material. See you around next time

Over at Weblogg-ed, Will Richardson looks at the differences he’s noticed between reading online and reading on paper. This section especially jumped out at me:

… For some reason, probably because I was a former English teacher, I reflect on this whole reading is changing discussion a lot. Probably 75% of what I read I read online. The other 25% is almost all books. I read all of my news from papers, magazines, etc. online, all of my correspondence, all of the blogs that I follow. And, as I’ve written before, my reading habits have changed a great deal. It has become an effort for me to work with longer texts, to do sustained reading and thinking, to stick with complex narratives. …

Read the rest of this entry »

Janet Clarey: Thoughts on the effectiveness of immersive simulations and on-demand learning.

iLibrarian: College students are increasingly interested in classes that offer online lecture capture. While the overwhelming favorite reason being to make up classes, a healthy number of them said that it improved their knowledge retention and overall scores.

eLearning Slam: In contrast to the previous item, here are several ways in which audio tracks for elearning can make it worse and less accessible.

Read the rest of this entry »

Jay Cross was interviewed for a recent TechRepublic whitepaper entitled, “Informal Learning: Extending the Impact of Enterprise Ideas and Information.” (Free registration is required, search the site’s white papers for ‘informal learning’ and you’ll turn it up easily.)

This exchange illustrated a key difference between Cross’ idea of where formal and informal learning are best used, based on whether the highly structured information is part of the course or the learner’s own understanding:

Read the rest of this entry »

eLearning Technology: Brain 2.0.

In the Middle of the Curve: Please, stop throwing stuff at me. (via)

Campus Technology: Web 2.0 and secondary orality.

Clive on Learning: What exactly is blended learning, anyway?

Janet Clarey: Stealth learning, for when you’re trapped with nothing else to do.

Karl Kapp: Learning to surf.

You’ve heard the old engineering joke, right?

There was an engineer who had an exceptional gift for fixing all things mechanical. After serving his company loyally for over 30 years, he happily retired. Several years later the company contacted him regarding a seemingly impossible problem they were having with one of their multi-million dollar machines.

They had tried everything and everyone else to get the machine to work but to no avail. In desperation, they called on the retired engineer who has solved so many of their problems in the past.

Read the rest of this entry »

When I was a kid, Mom explained to me that Elvis’ music and dance moves had once been considered scandalous.

Elvis!? Elvis impersonators officiate weddings. His music has joined that category of cultural artifact that’s now considered suitable for all ages. If he were performing on American Idol today, he would offend exactly none of the show’s faithful audience. For mainstream America, Elvis is establishment now.

Which is exactly how it should be in a culture that’s responsive to change.

Read the rest of this entry »

Exploring the edublogs once again …

Harold Jarche: Language learning expands without the costly infrastructure.

Janet Clarey: The edupunk way.

E-Learning Curve: A look at e-learning ecosystems and the failure of ADDIE, because knowledge delivery channels aren’t cognitively neutral.

Read the rest of this entry »