Interested in e-learning in a wider context than professional services? That feels like a large part of the venn diagram to me…
Take a look at the eLearning Network’s splendid new blog eLN insights. You also find that I’ve found a way to apply something from school Latin lesssons to real life – What can e-learning take from classical mythology?
Hope that Christmas and the festive season treats you excellently. Here’s a small gift of knowledge that I’ve been pleased to share, via the e-learning industry’s advent calendar, 24 tips:
http://24tips.elearningnetwork.org/2010/12/posing-question/
May your distractors find whole new levels of plausibility in 2011!
Possibly a sign of an industry’s maturity is when it has its very own advent calendar. The eLearning Network has sponsored this fab resource where each day you will get a gift of tips from some of the industry’s leading thinkers. Happy festivities @ http://24tips.elearningnetwork.org/
I was recently interviewed by AccountancyAge about my views on Continuing Professional Development. Here’s the resultant article. Leave me a comment if you want to continue the debate.
The “Ig Nobel Prize” was recently awarded to a research group who produced a simulation that showed that “If the Peter Principle is right, we should randomly promote people”. To recap, the Peter Principle states that people rise through organisations through roles for which they are competent to a role for which they are incompetent (and that’s where they stop). Apart from being an opportunity to nostalge about people you’ve worked with who conform to the principle, there is a serious point in the research somewhere… read more…
In September’s TJ, Rob Ashton of Emphasis gives his tips on how to write training materials more punchily. Whilst I enjoyed most of Rob’s messages, there was one piece of extraordinarily bad science that stood out: “According to a report by the William Glasser Institute, we only remember 20% of what we hear and just 10% of what we read. In contrast, we remember 80% of what we have experienced personally and 70% of what we discuss with others”. I have two problems with this. read more…
The state of the economy and the job market over the past couple of years has led to employees focusing more on self-preservation as the rounds of redundancies (or compromise agreements) crash around them. This has led to lower levels of teamwork and more silo-based thinking. As the economy (hopefully) starts to come out of the woods, organisations will need to start promoting more team-based and less individualistic behaviour. A key first step is to restore trust in the psychological contract between employee and employer…then possibly a spot of team-building would help?
The L&D profession has long made the distinction between adult learning (andragogy) and child learning (pedagogy). Having spent last week on holiday with my 2 year old daughter, I’m not so sure that this is a useful/ valid distinction to be making.
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An old freelance trainer who I used to work with would frequently say that “there’s no such thing as a new idea in training.” Maybe it was his way of selling his approach i.e. tell great stories, interspersed with a few activities that bear a passing resemblance to those regularly updated training manuals and a striking resemblance to the same activities he’d used for the past decade. However I’d agree with his contention that as a profession, L&D does seem to recycle ideas a lot. There’s also no shortage of ideas in training that are nonsense, masquerading as fact being recycled too!
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Today I have an article on Training Zone about the benefits and drawbacks of SaaS and cloud computing for managers in L&D. Especially if your internal IT department is being overwhelmed by users’s ever increasing expectations of technology, this is a way that you can take more direct control of the technology that makes L&D work