Confessions of an elearning skeptic

Just a quick update on the presentation I gave to my colleagues in relation to the elearning and web 2.0 technologies (see Ponderings Eight).  Despite the small audience the presentation has started a lot of healthy discussion within my workplace, with people starting to think about how they can use elearning and web 2.0 to broaden the impact of their training.  There is also a great deal of support for the del.icio.us trial.  So, all told, things are progressing very well.  The next step will be to broaden the audience for my presentation and get some individual areas coming up with some concrete ideas for how they are exploit the benefits on offer with web 2.0.  As always, watch this space.

As promised in Ponderings Nine here is my report on day two of the Australian Institute of Training and Development (AITD) conference in Sydney.

The second day was certainly focussed more on ‘convential’ types of classroom/face-to-face learning with the key session of the day a presentation by Dr Michael Marquardt on Action Learning. With my current focus on elearning I spent a lot of time pondering the significance of Action Learning to the elearning sphere, as most information about Action Learning implied a face-to-face activity rather than something done digitally. During my trip home on the train I started to draw some threads between Action Learning and Learning Communities that I think are valuable in my study of online Learning Communities. Like Action Learning, online Learning Communities:

• Place more value on the questions than on the answers. Most threads start with a question and the better the question the better the outcome of the thread.
• Place learning as a key outcome of the process. True learning communities are not about showing-up your knowledge, but on contributing and learning from others.
• Require participants to ‘listen’ and treat each other with respect.

With this in mind I’m keen to read further about action learning and see how it can inform my study of learning communities.  I bought Dr Marquardt’s book ‘Leading with questions‘ so I will be studing that closely too to see how I can apply it to my learning and my context.

Well, the conference is over for another year and I’m keen to exploit my post-conference enthusiasm and try and implement a few of the key things I have learned. Fingers crossed.

Just a quick update on my learning community participation.  I joined a couple of intresting new groups this week, one about blogging and one about leading and managing change.  The blogging group had some interesting forums in relation to the platforms people used for their blogging and how people managed their time in relation to regular blogging.  Having got a little blogging under my belt I felt comfortable putting my ten cents worth in on both these counts.   The managing change group is in its infancy, but included an intresting article in relation to change which struck a real cord with me as it mirrored my own past experiences in relation to the inability of many plans to realise that change is largely a human activity and is as much about people as it is about processes and infrastrucutre.  Being on the verge of preparing to introduce elearning into my workplace this was a valuable reminder of this important issue.

In the spirit of my own continuous learning I attended the Australian Institute of Training and Development (AITD) national conference in Sydney today.  Given this I thought I would dedicare a couple of posts to sharing my learning with you all.

Given my study of elearning, and my desire to introduce it into my workplace, my selection of workshops for today was focussed on elearning and its effective use and introduction.  Here is a summary of the key things that I learned today:

• It is important to distinguish between elearning as a product and learning as a process and to not confuse the two.  Good elearning creates learning but not all elearning does this.
• The importance of informal learning cannot be downplayed and we, as learning and development professionals, must learn how to harness it.  This requires us to move from being learning deliverers to being learning enablers (hence the title of this post).
• Elearning can assit us to be learning enablers when it is used to make knowledge accessible and encourage the creation of knowledge.  Many web 2.0 technologies are directed towards these aims.

Thanks to conference presenters Martyn Wild and Cheryle Walker for sharing their knowledge and expertise in relation to the above points.

A couple of interesting resources were also used during the conference that I thought would be worth sharing.  The first is an excellent presentation about change and preparing people for the world of the future.  The presentation is called Shift Happens and I highly recommend it if you haven’t seen it:

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The second resource comes from Jane McGonigal a games designer and researcher who has defined the “10 collaborative Superpowers“.  This is an interesting set of new skills that will be vital in the world of the learning enabler:

That’s enough food for thought for one day. The conference is on again tomorrow so I’ll post again then.  I better make sure I give an accurate account as my lecturer is one of the workshop presenters (g’day Anne ).

This week I will be presenting an item to our monthly staff information session about technology in education.  Why?  Well we are embarking on the introduction of elearning within my workplace and, as part of the planning process, it think that it is vital that staff start thinking about how they want to ‘deploy’ elearning within their particular training unit. To kick this whole process off I want to provide some food for thought.  My presentation will focus on learning communities, wikis and social bookmarking (via del.icio.us).  Why these technologies?  Well I wanted to use technologies that were a little outside the square but not technologically impossible and these seemed to fit the bill.  All of them offer great scope for new ways of learning without fear to hitting too great an IT wall! My inclusion of del.icio.us was also guided by my desire (see Ponderings Four) to get staff to centrally capture the online learning that many of them do.  Hopefully my planting will bear a bountiful harvest, only time will tell!

An item from the news links within my learning community caught my eye today. It concerned students from the University of Texas and their recent development of an anti-plagarism honour code. Under this code students would pledge to not commit acts of plagarism. All very honourable sentiments I hear you say. Indeed, except that sections of the code were copied directly from the honour code of Bringham Young University! On the surface this seems a clear cut case of irony in its purest form but, as the comments that follow the article point out, this is not as simple as it appears. You can read the full article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. 

As well as giving me a great laugh, the article has got me thinking about plagarism. Its a word you hear a lot in the world of education and something that I have already been pondering this week, largely because my workplace is in the process of developing its own plagarism policy. As well as reinforcing the fact that we need to reference any plagarism policy that we draw inspriation from, this got me thinking about the issue of plagarism in the on-line setting and how easy it is to take the ideas of others as pass them off as your own. Clearly the use of online media in education needs to have strict guidelines and I will be working to ensure that any plagarism policy that we develop is future-proofed by factoring in plagarism in all forms and all media. My studies in this area will prove invaluable in informing this process and the guidelines set down by my university will be a vital starting point.

One of the posts that I made to my on-line community, The Content Wrangler has led to real benefits for me. As part of one of my posts I mentioned that I was in the process of introducing elearning and looking for some ideas about good elearning design. Almost immediately I got a reply from a community member, Jenise Cook, with a number of fantastic links.  Chief amongst these was a link to a fantastic blog about elearning designed by Cathy Moore called Making Change. If you haven’t seem this blog, and you want to learn more about elearning design, then its something you need to check out.

I was particulalry taken with one of her posts, “5 ways to make linear navigation more interesting“.  The included PowerPoint show is fantastic and I will be using it in my workplace to demonstrate best practice in elearning design.

Thanks Jenise for sharing this excellent resource!

I have started dipping my toe into my chosen learning community, www.thecontentwrangler.ning.com.  The site has lost a little of its initial momemtum and the focus has shifted from general discussions into a series of focussed groups.  My initial focus is the Training Development Group which most closely fits my needs and context, though I have also joined the Content Manager’s Group and contributed to some of the more general discussions.

I am a little disappointed with the downturn in activity on the site, though this was always going to happen after its frenetic first couple of weeks.  Probably more concerning is the shift away from contributions and information sharing towards product marketing and touting for work.  This nows seems to represent the bulk of current activity, though this is contained within specific parts of the community.  Hopefully this trend doesn’t continue.  Regardless it is an excellent case study in the early days of a learning community and how its members shape it.

Like most new bloggers I scoured the Internet for inspiration when I started and, like most new bloggers, I soon learned that there are an awfully large number of blogs out there (up to 70 million depending on your source!).  As new bloggers we want our blog to be well designed and attact visitors who want to stay. The best way to do this is to learn from others who have achieved these goals.  So how do you spot one of these??  The simplest way is to locate blogs that have recieved one or more awards, so here are a few award winning sites from the recent 2008 Bloggie awards you might want to visit to get the creative juices flowing:

(1) Dooce.  This site won the ‘best designed weblog’ award. Dooce also picked up the overall award for 2008 too. An interesting piece of trivia about this weblog is that its creator, Heather B Armstong was the first person to be fired from her job for writing ‘unsavoury’ thing about her employer on her blog.  To this day anyone who is fired because of something they said on their weblog is said to have been ‘dooced‘ (true story, check the link!)

(2) loobylu.com.  This site won the ‘lifetime achievement’ award for Australia/New Zealand.  Its a great blog that is very visually engaging and gives some great ideas for using blogs to display artwork.

(3) PostSecret. This site was nominated for the “Weblog of the year award”.  Its a little confronting in places but I was totally hooked by the presentation and content.

(4) Gizmodo Australia.  A great Australian site about gadgets and gizmos.

 Happy browsing.

Deep down I’m a bit of a nerd and this means I really like to know what makes something tick.  If you are like me and ever wondered what happens when you create a blog post, like this one, I found a great resource from Wired Magazine (I told you I was a nerd) which gives you a great visual representation of all the stuff going on below the surface when you make a post.   This is also a great eye-opener if you want to know why your IT department is being so uncooperative in relation to your efforts to introduce blogging into your workplace as it outlines some of the Internet ‘nasties’ lurking out there waiting for an unsuspection post to come along!