Posted by Brandon Carson on 11/05/2009 at 06:49 AM in Education, eLearning, Games, Instructional Design, Social Learning | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
I've been attending quite a few webinars and presentations on social learning and hearing a lot of different approaches, best practices, and tips about implementation -- as well as watching demos of software tools and frameworks designed to help organizations implement collaborative learning environments.
I attended a webinar hosted by HCI about "Social Software in Enterprise Learning: Getting Started" and presented by David Mallon from Bersin. Here are some notes I took:
Here are some best practices for
beginning to implement an ELF with a SLE:
Posted by Brandon Carson on 09/10/2009 at 03:02 PM in Education, eLearning, Instructional Design, Social Learning | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
A quick Google search for Facebook Fatigue yields over 3,000,000 hits. Media types were already noting leveling off and dipping of Facebook use in January 2008. Of course, Luddite that I am I didn't bother joining until Brandon told me to in March 2008. Facebook was fun for a long while. I reconnected with high school friends, lived the New York club scene vicariously, and posted outrageous status updates. Now that business associates, conservative cousins, and my students' parents have friended me, I've dialed it back and present the appropriate for general consumption version of me.
I'm not sure that social networking sites within a company can work as social equalizers. People go to social networks to let their hair down, to be their non-work self. Sometimes exciting work-related ideas can be conceptualized and explored in a social site, but the few quality discussions that have been generated have gotten lost amongst the drivel. Social networks, just like any tool, need to have a focus.
I would like to more easily target my messages for the given audience within one application. I'd like to tailor my interactions according to whether someone is a brainstorming buddy, my pop culture queen or high school sweetheart. I like being able to see what friends and colleagues are up to in the frames that I know them, but while I don't mind knowing the sleeping or exercising habits of my distant friends, it doesn't add value to my life. While Facebook has attempted to set different groups for each user with different permissions, it's pretty clunky and not that useful.
I worry that similar kinds of issues would arise in an unfocused business or education social networking site. The immediacy and casualness of Facebook is its appeal, but do we need to feel as if we are living in an awkward holiday party everytime we log on?
Posted by Dolly on 08/27/2009 at 07:02 PM in eLearning, Rant | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
Tons of institutions want to leverage social learning for their educational purposes, but is it really appropriate? I've come to the conclusion that social learning and informal learning are two buzzwords for the similar concepts and share many of the same issues. At its root, formal learning seems to be differentiated by (hopefully) having clearly stated and measurable objectives. Despite the media in which it appears or the name it goes by, social, informal, or casual learning tend to be less objective-oriented and more difficult to measure.
I think whatever name we call it, nourishing, encouraging and providing space, virtual or IRL, for social learning is incredibly important. From my experience social learning can provide:
While it's important to recognize what social learning can facilitate, it's also incumbent upon us as designers and users to recognize its potential pitfalls:
As designers we need to recognize what social learning can and can not do use it as one more tool as we design effective learning experiences. Include opportunities for social learning, but do not dismiss our other methods.
Posted by Dolly on 08/12/2009 at 05:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Take a look at the following screenshot from an eLearning course. Think about what is wrong with it.
If you looked at this screen and thought:
You would have been on the mark. Extra points if you asked yourself, "where is the interaction?"
We know that instruction designed simply to transmit information is relatively ineffective. There are several fundamental reasons why users have difficulty using eLearning:
Posted by Brandon Carson on 07/28/2009 at 02:21 PM in eLearning, You Should Know Better | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
A friend and colleague approached me because my alma mater is interested in pushing into the world of online courses. I began thinking about what I think is critical about the university and college experience. Reflecting on all the numerous reasons why people go to college, I developed this list:
I think that these reasons can also be applied to graduate degrees as well. Of course all these factors and more influence which institution a student might choose as well. These variables include:
I think where you go to school matters, but not necessarily for the reasons people always give. More than anything the college becomes a kind of identifier of the sort of person they might be, just like another accessory. Regionally, I know what a choice to attend a particular college or campus might say. Nationally, we may tend to share those judgments. Reflect on what you might think about a individual you meet who graduated from Berkley or MIT or West Point. Even without knowing anything further about the individual you might make assumptions about their politics, interests, "style", or major.
For all their supposed rigor, The US News and World Report and other magazines' annual college rankings feel fairly subjective and ultimately ring a bit false. I'm not super excited to have a veterinarian who claims to have matriculated at Yale perform surgery on my pup. Ultimately, I don't really care what college a person has gone to as long as they perform their role well.
Others may not share that view. Online colleges need to stake out their expertise and proclaim what their requirements for enrollment are. I'm not impressed by online colleges advertising on every random social networking. Online colleges need to identify not only how they serve their audience, but how their audience, their graduates, serve us.
Next: What's valuable about the college experience... How do we replicate it and improve it online...
Posted by Dolly on 07/26/2009 at 04:56 PM in Education | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
I am convinced that technology knowledge and fluency is integral to having the fullest range of options in the 21st century. I mean, who's not.
My concern is how to facilitate the access that all of us techies take for granted. I don't have any answers, but I do have plenty of questions:
Suggestions?
Posted by Dolly on 07/15/2009 at 06:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
As business inevitably marches toward more sophisticated workplaces requiring more knowledgeable workers, I constantly see and/or hear about what I refer to as the "5 Mistakes" being repeated over and over in corporate learning organizations. In the new world of connected workers, corporate learning organizations should fear not addressing these issues:
Posted by Brandon Carson on 07/15/2009 at 01:29 PM in Education, eLearning, Instructional Design | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
I watched a video from the 2009 TED conference recently about practical wisdom and it struck me as relevant to a lot of what I do when I design learning programs for adults.
It seems like U.S. society as of late has emphasized a growing anti-intellectualism among the populace. I would argue that the anti-intellectual movement was a primary reason for the ascendancy of George W. Bush. There is a thirst in the country for a lurch away from the "educated elite" and their supposed progressive policies and thinking. This, combined with the high cost of education, may be a key component in the dismal numbers of higher-educated Americans: only 36% of adults in this country possess a college degree.
Barry Schwartz in his TED presentation discussed how society needs to place more emphasis on practical wisdom and empathy to help regain common sense and moral virtue. He used examples of rigid interpretation of the rule of law such as removing a child from his family because the father accidentally gave him alcohol in a lemonade drink, as a glaring case of society's inability to "improvise" outside of didactic rules to apply common sense. Our abdication of "improvising" to find solutions for day to day situations is forcing us to become morally bankrupt, and is fostering an inability to make decisions that serve all parties in their best interest.
Morally wise people know when and how to improvise, when to make exception to the rule, and use moral skills to serve other people. Schwartz stated in his talk that "wise people are made, not born." "Moral wisdom," he goes on to say, "requires experience. Wise people fail and learn from failure."
I agree, and would go even further to state that people learn best when failing. Failure is good, because it requires a person to try and understand how their performance was irregular, wrong, or inefficient enough to result in said failure. Through that deduction, people learn... you've heard the saying many times, probably from your own mother, "If you fail, then try try again."
An over reliance on rules denies us the ability to learn from failure, to do the right thing, and to be empathic to others. By divorcing ourselves of having to make a decision, we instead rely on over-restrictive guidelines, such as the one mentioned above, and become unwilling to take any situation in its conditional context and apply a common sense solution. Instead, we let the state interfere, and apply its own process to the matter, often resulting in over-regulation, under-regulation, or nonsensical solutions.
It is incumbent upon those of us who design curricula to establish relevant "failure zones" in the interactions, and to foster moral wisdom through those interactions. How do we foster moral wisdom? Schwartz stated that "Any work you do that involves interaction with others is moral work." By placing an emphasis on collaborative learning, designers can encourage connections between participants, and help transfer the singularity of individual accomplishment to the crowd. By leveraging the "wisdom of the crowds" the designer is doing their part in appealing to virtue. Through this new-found collaborative learning effort, and the feeling that it's OK to fail, learners will feel more confident in sharing and encouraging others: two key components of empathy.
If teachers would be allowed to introduce empathy into their lesson plans, we might also be able to address the growing anti-intellectual movement. For society to move away from this troubling trend, we must begin to teach children the value of virtue, and respect, and not be disinclined to look beyond the rigidity of rules to find solutions for specific situations.
By appealing to the "wisdom of the crowds" and involving others in the fostering of collective wisdom, we may just be able to bring back the belief that it's OK to apply common sense to problems we face, and to incubate practical wisdom in our students.
Posted by Brandon Carson on 07/09/2009 at 07:40 AM in Education | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Learning is about relationships. In the classroom environment, the learner has the opportunity to construct various types of relationships: with the instructor, with fellow learners, with the content, and even with the environment in which the learning is occurring. In the self-paced eLearning model, the relationship becomes more intimate – usually between learner and content only.
The read/write web platform presents several challenges to this relationship model. It enables the integration of the two models, and allows for even more dynamic forms of relationships to be constructed. For example, actions of the group can alter not only the course content, but potentially change the dynamics of the entire course flow. From the instructional designer's perspective, the challenge is to design meaningful and relevant information that is flexible, adaptable, and still meets the learning objectives.
Instead of relying on the ADDIE model for development where your intervention has a beginning and an end with measurable outcomes, you may want to move to an agile design (smaller deliverables in shorter times... I'll expand on this in another post), and build in a looping mechanism that enables user-generated touchpoints, groupthink, and two-way communication between your learners.
The biggest challenge is less about the knowledge or skills of the individual instructional designer, and more about the organizational transformation required to facilitate user-generated content to reside alongside more "formal" content. Adoption of the read/write web platform requires the ability for the instructional designer to perform what I call Stitch Design. Stitch Design involves weaving learning connections and social opportunities across the online community.
Key components of Stitch Design include:
With these ideas in mind, the read/write platform provides a forum for successful problem-based learning. It enables the learner to:
Posted by Brandon Carson on 07/06/2009 at 05:25 PM in Instructional Design | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)