There’s a lot of buzz around social media:  Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, Wikis, Flickr, the list of tools is seemingly endless and growing all the time.  So how do you integrate these tools into your employees’ or students’ learning? Nick Shackleton-Jones argues that most organizations go about this exactly backwards.  They launch social media tools and expect learners to use them.  A better strategy is to determine what tools are already being used by your employees or students and figure out what role the organization can play in their use.  Worth a read.

So, does it? Does it deserve to exist in order to fix a problem?  In many cases the answer is ‘no’. Let’s list some problems that training can’t fix, identify why training used to ‘fix’ them anyway, and what a better method of choosing a solution might be.

Organizations frequently use training as a ‘super solution’ to eliminate performance gaps.  However, performance gaps frequently have one or more root causes that are poorly addressed (if at all) by any kind of training:

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In my line of work I see a lot of learning goals and learning objectives.  Many of the latter are in need of work.  They’ve been crafted by people who are experts in their fields, which is usually not course design. To help those folks out, I’ve written a short article on putting together better learning goals and learning objectives.

I’ve spent a significant amount of time administering SumTotal, in particular setting up (“architecting”) course structures for both eLearning and in class learning activities.   I’m good at it now, but the learning curve would have been less steep had I known about the articles written by Terrabia Consulting.  They are less technical than the ‘official’ SumTotal documentation, but they provide a nice overview of several major SumTotal concepts.

If you work in PowerPoint alot, you may find this free add in to be of use.  It allows you to select elements on a slide, turn them into a PNG and automatically paste it back into the orginal slide.  This allows you to manipulate the PNG either within PowerPoint in or dedicated graphics programs.  If you use Articulate, you’ll love this. 

PowerPoint doesn’t get a lot of love.  It is reviled for overuse and misuse.  But it’s still the guilty secret of legions of course designers.  Why is this?

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soulkonekshen:

Blooms Digital Taxonomy: Web2 / elearning skills for each level http://bit.ly/brx8Be (via @marynabadenhors) #edbrunei

Too many LMS implementations are treated as an event, not a process. Hence the feeling of ‘We’re done here’ when the system finally goes live. 

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enzosilva:

Great, visual collection of useful social media resources for eLearning.

The Forseng Consulting Website.

A quick and dirty eLearning presentation (It’s not a course) on giving professional presentations.

eLearning is not appropriate for everything.  It is more useful for the lower end of Bloom’s cognitive outcomes:

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Thinking outside of the box with eLearning interfaces.