This great little video from SimplyZesty, an agency specialising in Online PR and Social Media based in Dublin, contains some fascinating stats about social media usage in the UK. Check the website out because they have a free e-book too.
The secret of a good debate is to choose a motion controversial enough to attract along a sizeable audience, but with enough subtleties and ambiguities that top quality speakers can explore without resort to dogmatism or play acting. After last year’s clasically contentious “This house believes that the e-learning of today is essential for the important skills of tomorrow" (90 for, 144 against), it was always going to be hard for Epic, the organisers of The E-Learning Debate, to come up with something to grab the imagination as readily, particularly now that several hundred of us have been able to experience the novelty of a debate in the Oxford Union. So, how about this?
”This house believes that technology-based informal learning is more style than substance."
The E-Learning Debate 2010 will take place at 4pm on October 6th. A prestigious speaker list includes informal learning guru Jay Cross (speaking against), author and academic Dr Alison Rossett (speaking for) and, just announced, Professor William Dutton of the Oxford Internet Institute.
Some of the arguments are predictable:
But it’s not as simple as that is it? Act fast if you want a place at the debate and a part in the outcome.
See my report on last year’s inaugural debate.
A recent posting on Mashable reports some interesting data from Resolve Market Research based on an online survey of potential purchasers and active users of iPads, smart phones, e-readers and portable video game devices in the USA. It provides some insights into the uses early adopters are finding for their iPads and the effect this is having on competitive devices:
The iPad was initially positioned as a device for reading, watching videos and web browsing. Only 28% of prospective purchasers said their main use would be playing games. However, having got hold of the iPad, 38% then said they no longer intended to buy a portable gaming device. True, even more (49%) said they would no longer be buying an e-book reader, but that was only to be expected. Owning an iPad had a much lower impact on people’s intentions to go on and buy a netbook (32%) or MP3 player (29%).
Surprising was that, for 37% of respondents, the iPad was their first Apple purchase. When you consider the ubiquity of the iPod and the number of iPhone and MacBook users out there, this is providing Apple with a host of new potential customers for their other products.
The early adopters of the iPad are young professionals, aged 22-45, which is hardly surprising. However, the group that’s following in their footsteps is not their kids but their parents, aged 45+. This gels with my own experience – the iPad gives you much of the functionality of a general purpose computer, but it doesn’t look or act like one. For many people it will be all they want.
It’s only fair to also say that 55% of prospective and actual users stated that they regarded the iPad as an expensive toy. In my view that’s not going to stop people buying them, and if the device continues to be used in more and more imaginative ways, it may well become as indispensable as all those other gadgets we now take for granted.
Recently I got an email from 'Sean, a fellow learning theory/tool fiend... I'm also a first year student at Harvard Medical School but I just launched my own tech-heavy learning project on the side. It's called Excel Everest (http://www.ExcelEverest.com), and it's a fully interactive "book" about Microsoft Excel, but written in an Excel file. It has 41 topics, 155 exercises, 339 buttons, and 87 embedded videos.'
There's a great introductory video on YouTube.
Well I tried it and it's a wonderful resource. Learning Excel within Excel is a great idea that works; you get to try out all sorts of fancy formulae and formatting right inside the tool - not by simulation but for real. Not only that, it's written in clear, friendly English with a heavy dose of humour. And did I mention that it's also challenging? Not patronisingly easy like so much IT training.
This would get my vote for a e-learning design award. If you're an IT trainer, get this and sit back while it does the job for you.
In his posting Depressing study of L&D, Donald Clark quotes research by Coleman and Parkes in Spring of this year, which involved interviews with 100 key decision-makers at major UK companies. Apparently this showed that:
Now I haven't seen this research in any detail, so I don't know how objective these results really are. But let's suppose they're true and my instinct tells me that they probably are. I'd be inclined to point the finger of blame (not a nice thing to do but hey) at the key decision-makers themselves:
What on earth are you doing tolerating such poor performance (at least as you perceive it)?
Would you sit back and do nothing if other departments performed so poorly?
What direction have you been giving to your l&d team?
On what basis did you appoint your l&d manager?
How much do you understand about the process of learning? If not very much, then what are you going to do about this?
The reality in my experience is that many major organisations do well in spite of themselves. Most departments have their fair share of hopeless cases and it's probable that l&d has exceeded its quota. But don't blame those on the shop floor, the trainers themselves, because they're simply doing what they're told and, to be fair, what has always been done. Most are extremely dedicated and hard-working. The majority do get results at the level of the individual learner, but probably not results that are strategically important.
If there is a problem, and this survey indicates that there probably is in more companies than is acceptable, then this is a problem of management. L&d requires strong and assertive leadership, like any other business function. And it needs to start by educating those above to understand the realities of adult learning in the workplace, not the business of processing employees through courses.
A recent article in The Economist, The evolving blogosphere, clarified for me how blogs have changed over the past five years and where they now sit amongst the panoply of social media applications. Not so long ago it was thought, almost assumed, that everyone would ultimately run their own blog - it was just a question of time before we all found something to say, gathered up the courage and started spouting off our opinions to those two billion or so internet users out there. It hasn't happened, and for several very good reasons:
Blogging is a specialist form of journalism, typically but not always aimed at a niche audience, and usually a voluntary, unpaid additon to the day job. A blog is essentially a regular column, with the added advantage that it can generate responses and a degree of dialogue. That may not be all that blogging thought it could become but it's still a very valuable addition to our online existence.
It's fashionable to sneer at the idea that a particular technology is merely a solution looking desperately for a problem to justify its existence. But I'm not so sure that a rational process always has to start with a problem and move dispassionately to a solution - the process is more dynamic and interactive than that. At the eLearning Network's Showcase last week, I had time to reflect on a number of technologies that were under discussion - the iPad, interactive PDFs (if you haven't spotted these, then these are next generation Acrobat documents that can incorporate interactive multimedia elements) and good old Second Life. The advocates of each of these could be accused of hunting for problems to solve in the world of learning technologies. As I contemplated these three technologies, I scanned all those problems currently and historically faced by any of my colleagues and clients to see whether I could find an application. Essentially, I had a bunch of solutions and I was looking for problems.
You do not have to wait until you have a new problem to solve and then sift through each of the currently available technologies to find the most appropriate solution. What about all the current solutions you have in place? Would any of these new technologies do the job better? That's why it pays to take a keen interest in each new technology and to remain as open minded as possible. It doesn't matter that the technology is launched as a solution looking for problems. And vendors often seriously misjudge what the applications for their products will be - they need the collective wisdom of many thousands of customers to come up with ideas that really work. Of course, some solutions never find problems and they disappear from view. But don't be put off because applications aren't instantly obvious - it can take quite a while for the great ideas to come forward.
So, checking existing problems to see whether new solutions will fit is fine with me. But inventing or reshaping a problem to fit a fashionable solution, now that's another thing completely.
I finally got round to reading David Wilkins lengthy and emotive post A Defense of the LMS on his Social Enterprise Blog. What struck me was not his arguments for the continuing use of the learning management system in an increasingly social media age, but his apparent desperation to get this viewpoint taken seriously when it so obviously conflicts with the current fashionable viewpoint, i.e. that LMSs have had their day, largely because top down, formal learning is soon to be obsolete.
Where I sympathise with David is that popular opinion (by which I mean among commentators on l&d, not actual practitioners) is so black and white, so polarised: what's new and fashionable doesn't just build on current practice it completely invalidates it; everything we do currently is the work of misguided dummies who have their heads firmly planted in the sand.
So, we are supposed to believe that formal learning is always wrong and informal learning always right; similarly for face-to-face v online, top-down v bottom-up, discovery learning v structured instruction, training v performance support, passive v interactive content, 2D v 3D, static v animated and so on. Any practitioner who has to run a real-life l&d function for a large organisation would laugh at the suggestion that all learning should be driven by learners, informally, as and when needed. Not only would this not work in very many cases, it would break numerous laws.
I am of course a keen supporter of social media, informal learning et al, as is David Wilkins (as he pleads time and again in his posting). I'm keen to see the balance shift away from top-down, classroom-dominated, just-in-case learning interventions. But I use the word balance advisedly. The discriminating l&d strategist will realise that it all depends on the situation, as it always does. Absolute positions are fine if you don't have to act upon them or to suffer the consequences.
I suspect that many of us find it hard to concentrate when we really need to put in a sustained effort to prepare a report or a presentation, read a document, write a script, create or edit media assets, generate code or assemble an e-learning module - in fact, all the things that e-learning people do most of the time. These tasks require single-minded concentration, sometimes over many hours, even days. How unfortunate, then, that in those times when we are less busy, we choose to install a whole load of apps that focus almost entirely on interrupting us - email, Twitter, Facebook et al.
I was amused, therefore, to read in The Economist (Stay on target, June 10) that it is now possible to buy software to protect you from other bits of software:
"Some programs fill the whole screen to keep disturbing alerts hidden; others disable specific websites, such as Facebook, or even cut off internet access altogether. The idea is similar to parental-control programs that prevent children from accessing inappropriate content: but these are controls that grown-up users deliberately impose upon themselves."
Examples include Freedom, Isolator and Think. As an example, Freedom cuts off your internet access for the number of hours that you plan to keep focussed. Once set up, the only way of over-riding this constraint is to re-boot.
Without the benefit of this software (and I'm not sure I would have the courage to turn it on, any more than an alcoholic would voluntarily go on holiday to Saudi Arabia) then there is an alternative, at least for me. I've always found trains to be the perfect places to concentrate and get things done - that's where I'm writing this post and probably a good half of all those that came before. The reason is that you tend to get really patchy cell phone coverage on a train journey, so even if you're armed with a smart phone and a 3G dongle, you'll be lucky to get more than a few periods of decent signal. Rather than let this bother you, it's easier to shut out the rest of the world and get your head down.
The Big Question for July on the ASTD Learning Circuits Blog is “Does the discussion of ‘how the brain learns’ impact your elearning design?” To emphasise the extent of this discussion, Tony Karrer lists 32 blog postings, including two of mine:
Brain rules – where does that leave us?, June 22, 2009
The art of changing the brain, May 13, 2008
The answer in my case is a quite simple ‘yes’. I have gained a great deal of benefit from what I have read on this subject and I have made every effort to integrate this into any design work I have undertaken over the past couple of years. The answer for the design community as a whole should also be ‘yes’, because this stuff has relevant and practical application, but I rather suspect that a great many designers take little time to get themselves up-to-date in their own professional discipline and are still working on the basis of the old instructional design theories from the 1950s.
Neuroscience hasn’t caused a complete rewrite of learning psychology, because in many cases it has only confirmed existing good practice. What this new focus on objective and relatively unbiased research has done is to (1) help us to recognise the pop psychology for what it is and (2) to create a bridge between the opposing forces in learning and development (the behaviourist/cognitivists and the constructivists). That is progress enough.
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If you want some heady reading for the weekend, this post on cognition and representation is the ticket. It offers a good development of the physical symbol system hypothesis and "the attempt to identify the code, or the codes, in which knowledge is supposedly represented." In particular, "What all of them appeared to have in common is the idea that mental representations are coded symbolically and are structured and computable." This is a view with which I disagree. To the extent that I am willing to countenance representations at all (and I'm sceptical here) I am more inclined to Searle's line of reasoning, "the most radical criticism of the classical view is the claim that the mind/brain is indeed a representational organ, but that the nature of representations is not that of a formal code." It's not a long paper, but it will keep you working for a while. Maurizio Tirassa and Marianna Vallana, Cogprints, July 30, 2010 4:26 p.m. [Link] [Comment]
David T. Jones makes the good argument that the very people calling academics Luddites are themselves Luddites. He argues that they employ an old-style top-down methodology that takes no account of the context of application. "Rather than tell academics what to do, you need to create contextualised experiences for academics that enable appropriation of new models of teaching and learning. What most senior managers at universities and many of the commentators don't see, is that the environment at most universities is preventing academics from having these experiences and then preventing them from appropriating the new models of teaching." David T. Jones, The Weblog of (a) David Jones, July 30, 2010 4:19 p.m. [Link] [Comment]
If alternative data storage systems geeks you out, you'll enjoy this discussion of non-SQL databases. "Brian Aker lists the features found in No-SQL, as well as the method of organizing and creating data within it. He also describes the general use of schemas and correlational systems in everyday language. His critical analysis of SQL as a whole encompasses several faults, too, including limitations on efficiency, organization, and the encoding language; it quite possibly has an element of satire to it. In this lecture, there is also a glimpse into data collection as a whole." Brian Aker, IT Conversations, July 30, 2010 4:11 p.m. [Link] [Comment]
Nice video explanation of Metaweb. "If you are interested, you can join the freebase community that is part of Metaweb. Through Freebase users can add content to the open database, creating entities. Although I signed up as a member, the registering process had a glitch in Firefox at first, I could access it through Internet Explorer. When I tried a bit later, Firefox was working ok as well for accessing Freebase.
Wow, CoSN may have set a new record for claiming to lead while trailing badly. Ian Quillen writes of a new CoSN report released Wednesday "pushing for the educational use of new Learning Content Management Systems (LCMS)." Or, writes Quillen, "or the acronym literate among us, a better summary might be: LMS + CMS = LCMS (FTW!)." Those of us who have been around long enough will recall Maish Nichani's article of almost exactly that name, LCMS = LMS + CMS [RLOs], first published May 02, 2001. That leaves CoSN just under ten years late in calling this "new." As for "FTW" (For The Win)? Well, your call. Ian Quillen, Education Week, July 29, 2010 4:16 p.m. [Link] [Comment]
Have eBooks really come of age, or are bloggers just jumping on a recent media bandwagon. There's no question perceptions of eBooks are being helped along by advertising for the Kindle, Nook and iPad. But I think overall sales of these devices are still quite low - three million iPads sounds like a lot (I can't find Kindle sales figures) but in a world of seven billion people, and one billion internet users, it's a drop in the bucket. Christine Cupaiuolo, Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning, July 29, 2010 3:56 p.m. [Link] [Comment]
David Wiley provides readers with a full summer of afternoon reading as most of his papers are now available. "My blog contains over 600 posts, but my longer writing typically goes to more academic outlets like journals. Thanks to the help of the amazing folks at BYU's Scholar's Archive (our institutional repository), much of my peer-reviewed work now has a stable home online, too. I've gathered up links to these peer-reviewed articles as well as whitepapers and other long pieces on a new page called Articles." David Wiley, iterating toward openness, July 29, 2010 3:40 p.m. [Link] [Comment]
The first post in the new iPad Curriculum blog covers the topic of Go Sky Watch Planetarium (it's a bit revealing that there are no links in the article to the application; you don't get to link to it unless you're Apple). The new blog, writes the author, "I will post app and web app reviews, highlight educational tools that work seamlessly on the iPad/iPod Touch/iPhone, and give tips and tricks for using the iPad/iPod Touch in the classroom." I personally wouldn't dedicate a blog to a single platform, but I'm sure some people will find this new blog useful. Kelly Tenkely, don't forget to put your name on your new blog somewhere; I had to go back to your old blog to find it. Kelly Tenkely, iPad Curriculum, July 29, 2010 6:17 a.m. [Link] [Comment]
There is such an irony in getting a lagging group, teachers, to change so that they can lead the change. The expectation that the adoption of new technology will be led by the teachers, once we get them to adopt this new technology, seems absurd. What we are seeing is that students (and the people who will eventually employ students) are adopting new technology, and teachers (followed, even more slowly, by administrators and professors) are scrambling to adapt. Jim Shimabukuro, educational technology & change, July 29, 2010 6:06 a.m. [Link] [Comment]
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