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Microsoft is entering the social networking space with LinkedIn, and it could find new revenue streams by monetizing products at both companies.

Dr Mark Cole, Head of L&D at Camden and Islington NHS Foundation, Catherine Noel, L&D Manager at Cannon and Jennifer Wrigley, L&D Manager at Discovery Networks International discuss how they tackle line manager training and how L&D professionals could better support and engage with their line managers to increase the success of their learning and development plans.

Sonera Finland organised the PING event on May 13, 2016 in Helsinki, Finland’s biggest Content Marketing Festival. Gerd Leonhard’s keynote on the Future of Content, Technology, Society and Humanity is now available online.

Read also: Interview with Gerd Leonhard (in Finnish)

Article on PING Helsinki

The following post originally appeared on the Office Blog, announcing details of the Class Notebook Tools now available within OneNote 2016 for Mac.

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You’ve been asking for it and today it’s here! We’re excited to announce Class Notebook Tools for OneNote 2016 for Mac, which helps teachers work even more efficiently with their Class Notebooks—on the Mac platform some teachers already know and use.

With this update, the Class Notebook tab is visible if you are teacher in a Class Notebook for which you have administrative rights. To set up a Class Notebook, visit www.onenote.com/classnotebook.

With the Class Notebook Tools for Mac, you can do the following:

• Quickly and easily distribute pages or new sections to students in a class.
• Copy sections to Content Libraries in multiple notebooks.
• Sequentially review student work (assignments, quizzes, etc.).
• Easily navigate and browse student notebooks through a student list.
• Launch Class Notebook app functionality.
• Visit useful professional development and community resources.

Below are some highlights of what you can do with the Class Notebook Management Tools. For more details, visit the Class Notebook Tools for OneNote 2016 for Mac user guide.

Distribute a page to all of your students with two clicks

Rather than sending students to the Content Library to copy a page for themselves, a teacher can distribute a page to all students in a class with just two clicks.

Review student work

Teachers are provided with a list of all the pages they’ve distributed and a quick way to sequentially review work (homework, assignments, quizzes, etc.). Simply click a student’s name to navigate to the page in the student’s notebook.

View students’ Class Notebooks

With this view, navigating student Class Notebooks is a cinch. Teachers are provided with an easy-to-scan list of all students and their sections to quickly browse and navigate to—and monitor their students’ activity.

Easily manage students Class Notebooks

The Manage drop-down makes handy links for teachers easily accessible. You can also add or remove students or teachers from a Class Notebook or get started on creating a new Class Notebook under the Manage drop-down.

We plan to continually improve these tools and deliver on top requests. Please don’t hesitate to email us directly at classnotebook@onenote.uservoice.com, where the Class Notebook product team reads through every piece of feedback received.

We’re excited for teachers to try Class Notebook Tools for Mac and look forward to hearing feedback!

IBM Watson team introduces new services, details evolved capabilities, forecasts market opportunities. But we’re still hungry for real-world success stories.

IBM’s Watson unit keeps developing new offerings, growing its ecosystem and explaining the big opportunities ahead. If only it could share more of the customer case examples that remain under non-disclosure agreement (NDA) wraps.

What would-be customers really want to see, after all, is examples of Watson clobbering real-world problems the way it trounced its puny human competitors in “Jeopardy.” But to be fair, a lot of building, learning, refining and ecosystem building is required when starting a business from scratch.

At the first IBM Watson Analyst Day held this week in Cambridge, Mass., the conversation was mostly about how IBM is setting the stage — a very big stage — for cognitive business. In the two-plus years since it was established as its own commercial business unit within IBM, IBM Watson has gone from addressing three industries to 20 industries, from doing business in one country to 45 countries, from one language to eight languages, and from three partners to 550 partners.

Instead of talking about big, high-profile cognitive projects spearheaded solely by IBM, the company is increasingly talking about the portfolio of cloud-based cognitive services that can be exploited by the growing developer community. Where Watson began with one application programming interface and hundreds of mostly internal developers, today there are more than 30 APIs and tens of thousands of developers, IBM said this week.

IBM also detailed a number of developer-oriented announcements:

Sentiment and Insight services. In a collaboration with Twilio, IBM this week introduced IBM Watson Message Sentiment and IBM Watson Message Insights. Pre-integrated with Twilio’s APIs, the services use sentiment analysis to detect sentiment in SMS streams at scale, in the case of Message Sentiment, and to distill the key meanings of messages, in the case of Message Insight.

Learning Korean. In a an agreement with SK Holdings C&C, a Korean IT services company, IBM Watson will be trained to understand Korean so South Korea-based developers can use localized APIs and services to accelerate the creation and deployment of cognitive applications.

Machine vision and voice analysis. IBM merged its AlchemyVision and Visual Recognition services to power a unified Watson Visual Recognition API. Separately, Watson Tone Analyzer for spotting snark, sadness, elation and other emotions in text is now generally available.

In addition to adding new APIs and services, IBM is also tinkering with the packaging of existing solutions to make them easier to consume. For example, Watson Engagement Advisor (WEA), which debuted in 2013, has had a makeover. WEA is designed to improve the customer service experience by assisting service agents or interacting directly with customers in complex service scenarios. IBM said this week that Engagement Advisor has been decomposed into more granular, developer-ready services that are pre-trained on common customer-service needs and intentions. An integration framework was also added to make it easier to connect to common applications and data sources.

Where Engagement Advisor deployments initially averaged six to nine months, time to production has been shortened considerably, says IBM. What’s more, the new tooling makes it more of a self-service proposition that than something requiring consulting support.

What’s Next

Among the big opportunities ahead for Watson, IBM execs detailed progress and plans in three domains:

Healthcare. Healthcare has been the top industry priority from the earliest days of Watson, so Watson Health was split out as a separate unit within IBM Watson. In fact, this week’s event was held at the just-opened Watson Health headquarters. IBM sees a $200 billion opportunity for Watson within the $8 trillion worldwide healthcare industry, so it has invested heavily in data drive cognitive healthcare solutions. This week we heard a bit about how the acquisitions of Truven, Explorys and Phytel have helped create one of the world’s largest collections of health data. That data is fuel for the IBM Watson Health Cloud and its analytics, image analytics and knowledge platforms.

Cyber security. Earlier this month IBM announced Watson for Cyber Security. The average company faces some 200,000 security events per day, including everything from network hacks and viruses to routine logons and user-access requests. A central tenant of Watson Cyber Security is learning to distinguish between ever-changing real threats and false positives so the technology can filter out the latter and free security professionals to focus on real problems. Toward this end, IBM is integrating its Watson for Cyber Security with the IBM QRadar SaaS app and IBM X-Force threat-intelligence database to give Watson rich troves of ever-evolving data to power cognitive security analyses.

Internet of Things. Not all IoT applications call for cognitive capabilities, but IBM sees a fit wherever there’s human-to-machine interaction at scale. For example, cognitive is envisioned in cognitive route-planning services that will combine real-time and historic data with traffic, weather and social event data, like concerts and ball games, to predict better routes. In another example, a steel plant customer of IBM’s it interested in a wearables application in which foundry workers are fitted with sensors so Watson can detect and alert managers to early signs of heat stroke.

MyPOV on Watson’s Progress

The one key factoid missing from this week’s event — one that Constellation Research advisory customers ask us about — is how many customers are successfully using IBM Watson in production? IBM doesn’t share such statistics, but analysts were recently given an NDA peek at industry use case and real-world customer examples. Nearly a dozen major companies were cited by name in this March briefing. I came away impressed, so I was a bit disappointed this week when customer citations and examples weren’t on the agenda.

As for IBM’s focus on delivering more granular, digestible services and enabling an ecosystem, these are good moves that will spread the burden of building what is more than just a new business unit. As IBM has described it, cognitive is a whole new era for computing.

The good news is that IBM is no longer going it alone. Systems integrators, in particular, have been introducing cognitive capabilities over the last year. In some cases the offerings might not fit IBM’s definition of cognitive — being closer to combinations of automation, robotics or artificial intelligence techniques. But the development work and conversation has begun, and competition will be nothing but good for this nascent market.

Related Reading:
IBM Analyst Forum: A Tale Of Two Titans
IBM Insight 2015 Spotlights Cloud Services, Spark, Watson Analytics Upgrades
IBM Watson Gets Ready to Scale

Each year I struggle to comply with the LQAF criteria for Knowledge Management (KM) and each year I keep saying that I will find a course, or read more, to really understand what is meant by KM.  Well this is the year. The thing that will make a real difference In line with the Knowledge … Continue reading Can I deliver Knowledge Management? A view from the library service coalface →

In this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast, Intrepid Learning makes the case that professional learning should not only deliver value to businesses with innovative approaches to PD, but also provide next-gen employees with credentialing that can be carried throughout their careers.

The post Badging for Business: Next-Gen Professional Learning in the Workplace appeared first on Getting Smart.

Training Isn't Learning, fm @sjgill https://t.co/gR9M2ScZyt #c4lpt

— Jane Hart (@C4LPT) March 25, 2016

from Twitter https://twitter.com/C4LPT

With a lack of career development opportunities being the number one reason why employees leave organizations; employers are increasingly recognizing alternative rewards as an essential component of a competitive total employee rewards strategy. In fact, companies prioritise career development more than other alternative rewards, benefits and bonuses, according to new research by the Hay Group division of Korn Ferry (KFY). Nine in ten organizations (90 percent) surveyed employ four or more alternative methods of rewarding employees (including career development programmes, health and welfare benefits, additional paid time off and other benefits) as part of their HR strategy. More than 8 out of ten organizations surveyed said that alternative rewards are key to being an employer of choice (89 percent), remaining competitive (87 percent) and engaging employees (81 percent). Eighty-seven percent of respondents also agreed that alternative rewards are an important tool in retaining the organization’s existing talent.

Over the next year, the vast majority of organizations (71 percent) plan to increase their use of alternative rewards. More than two-thirds of respondents (69 percent) plan to expand their use of alternative rewards at the manager/professional level and below, while the rate is slightly lower for executives, at 53 percent.

Across all employee levels, career development programs are poised to see the biggest expansion in use during 2016. More than half of respondents indicate they intend to expand the use of career development programs across all employee levels, supporting the creation of a stronger bench of employees with the hard and soft skills needed to assume more challenging roles within organizations.

“These findings underscore what we are seeing with our clients and their focus on putting together career development frameworks across the entire organization – from the staff support ranks up to executive levels,” said Tom McMullen, rewards practice leader at Hay Group.

“Even within the upper echelons, career—and leadership—development opportunities are critical to developing the competencies that can help elevate employees to the C-suite or prepare them to take on new functional roles.”

Hay Group’s global employee opinion database reveals that a lack of career development opportunities is the number one reason why employees leave organizations. The Alternative Employee Rewards survey findings indicate leaders are elevating and addressing this issue within their organizations and building career development into their broader total rewards strategies.

The post Career development most important driver for employee engagement appeared first on Workplace Insight.

I’ve just reviewed this book on “Managing online reputation” for Professional Marketing magazine http://www.pmforum.co.uk/magazine/

It’s a timely book considering the increasing use of social media in professional service firms and the underlying fear that problems in this arena – whether of internal or external origin – could have a catastrophic impact on a hard-earned reputation. And it’s fantastically international in scope which must be valuable to those managing global reputations.

It takes a strategic and systematic approach to analysing the range of risks and types of problems – whether created by customers, employees, journalists, activists, on-line tribes or even your own campaigns. There’s also an interesting look at unethical marketing – astroturfing, sock puppetry and censorship.

The first 80 pages are devoted to analysing the risks, pages 80 to 130 on response and managing crises and finally pages 130 to 200 on preparations to handle crises.

In terms of pragmatic advice, there are a number of useful frameworks:

• Assessing the situation
  • Visibility
  • Virality
  • Sentiment
  • Influence
• Five response options
  • Communicate
  • Negotiate
  • Leave
  • Minimise
  • Remove
• Dealing with client complaints
  • Move fast but make sure of the facts
  • Do the right thing in the right way
  • Be seen to be listening and learning
  • You don’t need to respond to everyone
  • Take control when appropriate
• Dealing with employee issues
  • Set out your position quickly, clearly and in full
  • Step back and don’t get into fights
  • Keep your staff in the loop and be consistent
  • Address yourself to the community
• The backfiring campaign
  • Be sensitive but don’t overreact
  • Admit the error of your ways
  • Repent sincerely
• Different types of negative situation
  • Severity
  • Longevity
• Social media crisis plan should include:
  • Crisis and issues definitions
  • Goals and measurement
  • Online stakeholder and influencer lists
  • Policies and protocols
  • Content (including crisis holding statements), channels and tools
  • Team, partners and suppliers
  • An appendix of examples
• Levels of crisis
  • Critical
  • Severe
  • Significant
  • Moderate
  • Low
• Social media crisis team members
  • Listen to and analyse online discussions
  • Evaluate and develop social media campaigns and programs
  • Manage online discussions, both on official social media profiles and third party platforms
  • Develop and distribute online content including videos
  • Create and manage online advertising campaigns
• Responding to a crisis
  • Be fast rather than perfect
  • Establish the appropriate social tone
  • Keep information flowing
  • Listen actively and be seen to be listening
  • Proactively rebut rumours and misinformation
• Cleaning up your search reputation after a major meltdown
  • Know your objectives
  • Think laterally
  • Think visually
  • Focus on high-authority channels
  • Distribute content widely
  • Create a dedicated crisis hub
  • Maximise your recovery
  • Know what not to optimise
  • Take the long view
• Top tips
  • Know where you are going
  • Prepare to move fast and with prevision and finesse
  • Commit to transparency but understand your limits
  • Walk the talk with confidence but not arrogance
  • Listen with your ears, eyes and heart and not with your mouth
  • Be spontaneous, creative and make mistakes
  • Understand what online reputation isn’t and can’t fix

I’m delighted to see that the author shares my nervousness about social media and search engine automation.

It’s an important read for anyone who is responsible for reputation management – whether in a marketing and communications function or at Board level. Lawyers who are involved in defamation and intellectual property abuse cases and risk managers might also find it helpful. And it would be a great investment for those studying the CIM’s course on Corporate Reputation Management.

Research references

CIC/Ogilvy Public Relations – An analysis of the impact of online buzz affecting foreign and local companies in China during 2013 discovered that purchase intent collapsed between an average of 169% and 221% immediately, dropping to its lowest level four days after the incident. It also discovered that launching an investigation is more effective than admitting the problem from the start and apologising.

CIM – 62% consumers are sceptical about companies’ online marketing methods with only 20% reporting high levels of trust and confidence about what companies say online about themselves.

Clifford Chance/EIU – Reputation risk is now regarded as the second most important risk after financial risk. 57% board members are most concerned about damage to reputation, 39% are most worried about impact on share price and 33% about direct financial cost in the form of lost sales.

Deloitte – 87% respondents rated reputation risk as “more important” or “much more important” than other strategic risks

Deloitte/Forbes Insights – Corporate leaders think the risk of social media ranks alongside financial risk as one of the single largest threats to their business.

Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer – News and commentary about crises stemming from behavioural issues spread faster online than any other type. Amongst 102 senior crisis communications professionals at UK/European multinationals it was found that a quarter of crises are picked up by the international media within one hour of an incident happening and two-thirds within 24 hours. Over half of the incidents were still in the news a month later.

McKinsey – The more broadly and deeply firms adopt social technologies the bigger the reported benefits notably through increasing speed to access knowledge and reducing communications and travel costs. Between USD 900 billion to 1.3 trillion can be unlocked through improved communication and collaboration.

Thomson Reuters – Defamation actions jumped 23% in the UK in 2014, with much of the rise attributable to social media.

Favourite quotes:

“It is often said that the true test of a negative situation is how you handle it; the social web has the effect of making already difficult situations even more intimidating”

“Any half-decent communications or marketing professional will tell you that effective communication starts with understanding the audience”

“The traditional model of corporate reputation managed by communications and corporate affairs professionals is effectively over and that marketing, sales, customer service, HR, legal, risk management, internal audit and social media must all be actively involved and working more closely together”.

“Threats can now be made by just about anyone, at any time, from any place and in ways that are expressly designed to cause maximum disruption and reputational damage”

“Research shows we are now only able to concentrate for eight seconds – one second less than a goldfish”

“One sound tactic (in activist situations) is to get the most authoritative, trusted experts you can find to speak out in your favour”

“Let the community come to your defence”

“Dwight D Eisenhower reputedly said that “plans are useless but planning is useful””

Book contents:

1. The New Abnormal

PART 1 – Understanding the threats

2. Defining online reputation threats
3. Strategic and financial threats
4. Social and environmental threats
5. Behavioural and legal threats
6. Operational and technological threats

PART II – Managing incidents

7. Formulating the right response
8. The furious customer
9. The rogue employee
10. The committed activist
11. The hostile journalist
12. The backfiring campaign

PART III – Handling crises

13. The changing face of crises
14. Preparing for a crisis
15. Responding to a crisis
16. Recovering from a crisis

The post Book review: Managing online reputation – How to protect your company on social media by Charlie Pownall appeared first on Kim Tasso.

Online courses are not always a priority for employees, especially as past experiences with lackluster courses have turned many of them away from eLearning. Arguably, the benefits of online learning outweigh those of a traditional training environment, especially for busy employees who are frantically trying to balance their work and family time. And yet, despite the added convenience and flexibility compared to traditional training, employees still show a degree of reluctance to online training programs.

So, what can you do to bring employees, burned out by poor online training experiences, back? And what features can you add to your courses to rev them up and make them enticing to your employees?

In this post we’ll have a look at what employees want in an online training program.

The Anywhere, Anytime Flexibility

Flexibility to follow the course on the learner’s own schedule is of utmost priority — and this includes being able to access their training content offline.

Paradoxical as it may sound, access to offline content can be a very important enabler of online training. This is especially beneficial for globally dispersed employees who may not have the appropriate bandwidth or a generous enough data plan for mobile access to training material.

Thus, to make the learning task connectivity-independent, reading materials and other documents should be available for offline use.

With eFrontPro, employees can learn on the go, with or without a connection, thanks to its built in support for offline courses. Instructors just need to enable the “offline” mode for a course in its settings page, and learners get the option to download all the lesson’s contents and resources for offline viewing from within their familiar eFrontPro web interface.

In fact, eFrontPro is smart enough to automatically switch to offline access anytime there’s not an active internet connection present (and, of course, get back online again). The feature works in all modern browsers and operating systems — including iOS and Android devices.

Another perk in terms of flexibility is being able to catch up on your training from home or, generally, places other than work. Being able to have just-in-time (JIT) access to training material is important too — employees frequently need to access learning materials while working on a specific task or procedure.

For both of these reasons, making the content accessible from mobile devices is important. And with eFrontPro, that’s the default anyway, as the platform comes with a fully responsive user interface that adapts and looks equally good on your desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone.

Last but not least, another way to make employee training more flexible is to offer support for microlearning — making knowledge accessible in chunks that are easier to remember and recall.

Again, eFrontPro comes with built-in support for microlearning, but we also have a dedicated platform called Snapicco that makes corporate microlearning a breeze.

Social Learning Features

Let’s be honest here, there are more competent and less competent trainees, and having employees that fall in either extreme of the performance spectrum can be less than pleasant to deal with.

Training should move at a pace desired by the trainer, not at the pace of the quickest learner or at that of the slowest one.

The social learning model helps the trainee to learn at their own pace and acquire a unique and individualized learning experience.

Employees enjoy learning from experts and helping each other in the discussion forums or in group chat sessions. Challenging content can be discussed with over-achievers before moving on to the next lesson. Document-sharing, peer feedback and comments on assignments are also well-appreciated.

Online training, when done socially, increases employee engagement and satisfaction.

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Online training, when done socially, increases employee engagement and satisfaction.
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From built-in forums, groups, and personal messages, to document sharing and more, eFrontPro comes with most of the tools you need to add the crucial social element to your learning.

And if you want to take this social thing up a notch, there’s our tried and true “eFront for IBM Connections” platform, that connects with the Big Blue’s industry-leading IBM Connections Social Workplace software.

Interactivity

Employees love interactivity and total involvement with their training content.

So, how can you establish that?

Immersive and interactive are the two main keywords here. Start with a bewitching storyline, believable yet dramatic. Something that feels like a “good read”. Use that, and involve a few characters who need the help of the learner.

Also, take note of how individuals are hooked to game environments — and create your own learning-oriented game environment. Remember the last simulation game you played? Strive to bring a similar emotional feeling in your eLearning courses. There could be a main character that the learners identify with, and get anxious to help by applying their knowledge.

Be consistent in your design and characters — your storyline should end with a satisfying ending, and the main character should be happier towards the end of the course, which will translate to your learner feeling more excited and satisfied. They should be talking to their peers on how well they did in the course and what could have been done better.

With eFrontPro’s support for full multimedia course creation, including rich H5P content, you can build all kinds of complex interactive learning experiences. Sprinkle a little gamification dust on top, and you’ll soon have employees hooked on their eLearning portals and trying to outdo each other and score better.

Speaking of scores, another feature employees get addicted to are frequent and short quizzes.

Avoid waiting till the very end of a large chapter to assess employees — this will only have them unlearn facts and build up anxiety for the upcoming “big” test.

Instead, assess them intermittently throughout the course, as a safety net that they can use to master skills and acquire knowledge in a secure environment.

eFrontPro gives you all the tools you need to create fun mini-quizzes to test your learners at the end of each lesson, including the ability to auto-generate tests for you from a question pool.

Course Evaluation

Here’s a fun idea: instead of having a bunch of senior managers evaluate any given course and offer comments for improvement, how about asking your learners?

Trainees really appreciate it, and perform better, when they are shown that their opinions, with regards to their training program, are valued.

Problem is, if you go and ask them “how do your think this course could be improved” directly, you’ll most likely only get “no comment” as their post-course evaluation. They all have their opinions and ideas on improvement, but none wants to appear too critical.

So how can you get those out of them successfully?

Ask them indirectly. Depending on the length of your course, divide the course into three to four sections. After each section, give them an “emotion rater” survey — something fun and easy to fill out.

Feel free to use emoticons and other graphics, and ask the trainees how they are feeling at that point of the course. Ask about their high and low points with regards to that section. Add a quiz-type question asking them the meaning of a couple of the main keywords from that section. Make this survey short and simple.

With the aid of eFrontPro’s survey tools and built-in survey analyzer, breakdown their responses and use this feedback as your course evaluation.

While the drive to learn and grow professionally exists in most employees, it can be ignited to its full potential only by integrating their suggestions and fine-tuning your training program to their needs.

To keep in touch with those needs, always ask your employees what they want to see in their training program.

The post What Do Employees Want in a Training Program? appeared first on eFront Blog.

With Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn in the news, here’s a LinkedIn cheat sheet (from Leisure Jobs) that will help you quickly create the perfect Linkedin profile, maximise your online visibility, build your contact list or get contacted about a new job.

Leisurejobs.com

The Dogs Hate Hugs infographic from Pet Insurance U reveals the surprising fact that dogs really don't like being hugged.

This infographic shows humans why, in spite of this whole hugging fiasco, dogs are still your best friends. Do dogs hate hugs? Researchers studied pictures of humans hugging dogs, and 81.6% of the dogs showed visible signs of distress, discomfort, stress or anxiety.

Designed by NowSourcing, this is a good example of an infographic highlighting an insight that is probably surprising to the audience. Infographics should share some insight or knowledge learned from data research that will actually teach the readers something new.

I have one major issue with the way they visualized their data. The statistic of "Oxytocin levels rise by 57.2% when dogs play with their owners" is visualized with a non-zero baseline, making the increase in the bar chart appear to by a 10x difference. This visualization is extremely misleading. Don't adjust the scale of the y-axis to over-emphasize a change in the data!

Thanks to Brian for sending in the link!

Emran Mian argues that the left is offering no constructive alternative to the government's market-led agenda in HE, and thus have very little of use to add to the debate.

The post The left is lost on higher education appeared first on Wonkhe.

Here’s the programme details for 2016:

 

The post Penge Art Trail June 2016 appeared first on Penge Tourist Board.

Lots of universities have been offering puppy rooms to relieve students' exam stress. And there's now some evidence it works.

The post Puppy love: it seems puppy rooms really do work appeared first on Wonkhe.

One way I stay connected with the community and what’s happening in the field is by reading blogs by instructional designers, elearning professionals, and educators. I use Feedly for my RSS reader, but you can use other readers or subscribe via email.

If you don’t want to subscribe to all these blogs individually, check out eLearning Learning. This is my favorite blog aggregator in the field. You can sign up and choose your interests for a daily or weekly/monthly/yearly emails. You can also search the archives if you’re looking for something specific.

In (sort of) alphabetical order*:

1. Always Learning is where Kim Cofino writes about her experiences as a technology coach in international schools.
2. Ashley Chiasson is an instructional design and e-learning consultant. She writes about the experience of working independently and about creating e-learning in Storyline. Her “Terminology Tuesday” posts illuminate jargon in the field.
3. Bozarthzone by Jane Bozarth isn’t updated as regularly as some others on this list, as Jane is more active on Twitter and writes a column for Learning Solutions Magazine. Her posts revolve around the practical realities of supporting learning–and that doesn’t mean just formal training courses.
4. Cathy Moore is on a mission to “save the world from boring training.” Her action mapping model guides instructional designers to create engaging learning that focuses on what people need to DO rather than what they need to KNOW.
5. chat2lrn is a regular Twitter chat. Prior to each chat, the discussion topic is explained in a blog post.
6. Clients from Hell isn’t actually an instructional design or elearning blog, but any freelancer or consultant in the learning field will recognize the scenarios. If you need to chuckle about endless client requests for revisions, vague feedback, and communication failures, this is always good for a laugh.
7. CogDogBlog is about educational technology, social media, Creative Commons, and a number of other topics that author Alan Levine finds interesting.
8. Dave’s Educational Blog by Dave Cormier often focuses on his theory of rhizomatic learning. Cormier is the person (with George Siemens) who coined the term MOOC and has been involved in MOOCs literally since their very beginning in 2008.
9. David Kelly (Misadventures in Learning) is best known for his curated backchannels for conferences. If you want to learn from a conference that you can’t attend in person, David’s blog and Twitter feed are the ones to follow. He also writes about curation and e-learning in general.
10. The Edublogger is a team blog focused on blogging and educational technology with K-12 students.
11. The eLearning Coach by Connie Malamed is full of useful tips on visual design and elearning design in general.
12. The eLearning Leadership blog by Allen Interactions writes about e-learning as explained in Michael Allen’s books, including the SAM method and focusing on scenarios.
13. On E-Learning Provocateur, Ryan Tracey writes about the future of L&D and the big trends in the field like curation, gamification, and augmented reality.
14. E-Learning Uncovered posts about once a month about creating e-learning. This blog is published by the same group that writes the E-Learning Uncovered books (Diane Elkins, Tim Slade, et al).
15. Ant Pugh’s eLearning Architect shares experiences from someone who is in the trenches every day working as an elearning consultant.
16. The eLearning Guild’s TWIST blog shares highlights from their conferences and #GuildChat. They also provide curated content each week, a great way to find some new articles or authors you might otherwise have missed.
17. Stephen Downes calls Half an Hour “a place to write, half an hour, every day, just for me.” Because Stephen’s interests and expertise are wide ranging, so are the topics of this blog–connectivism, philosophy, the future of learning, MOOCs, learning technology, research, etc. This blog tends towards longer posts and more theoretical content. Stephen is one of the originators of MOOCs and connectivism.
18. Harold Jarche is a thought leader in personal knowledge mastery/management, leadership, and workplace learning.
19. I Came, I Saw, I Learned by IconLogic: This is a group blog with multiple contributors on topics including tool tips (Captivate, Camtasia) and writing tips. When I’m troubleshooting Captivate, I often find myself referring to their old posts.
20. In the Middle of the Curve by Wendy Wickham is a blog I have been reading for many years. In fact, her blog is one of the first ones I linked to and quoted way back in 2007. Wendy writes about the practical, real-life challenges she faces as a training and technology specialist and how she is working through them.
21. Janet Clarey specializes in research on learning and performance.
22. Kapp Notes is where Karl Kapp writes primarily about games for learning, including resources and notes from his many presentations.
23. LearnDash is a WordPress LMS plugin, but the blog discusses many broader elearning topics, not just their own product.
24. Learning in the Modern Workplace is Jane Hart’s blog on “modernising workplace learning” by moving beyond traditional training to supporting social and informal learning.
25. Learning Solutions Magazine from the eLearning Guild is an edited online magazine rather than a blog. There are regular columnists, as well as contributions from practitioners in the field.
26. Learning Technologies Blog is ATD’s blog on elearning and learning technology
27. Learning Visions is written by Cammy Bean, author of The Accidental Instructional Designer. Many of her recent posts have shared what she’s learning at conferences, as well as sharing notes from her own presentations.
28. Clark Quinn has been blogging at Learnlets for over 10 years. Quinn is a thought leader in workplace learning.
29. OL Daily is where Stephen Downes has been curating daily and weekly collections of interesting links in the learning field for 15 years, since before “curation” was a hot trend. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the size of this list of blogs, subscribe to just eLearning Learning and OL Daily. That will give you a good cross section from a wide range of corporate and academic writing.
30. The Rapid E-Learning Blog by Tom Kuhlmann is one of the most popular blogs in the field because it shares practical tips that even beginners can apply.
31. Rapid eLearning Adobe Captivate is Adobe’s official blog on Captivate.
32. The Science of Learning Blog is a place where ATD summarizing research on learning for practitioners.
33. The New ID posts a comic every other week about “the joys of training.”
34. Will At Work Learning by Will Thalheimer shares evidence and research about what actually works in learning.
35. Will Richardson has been blogging for 15 years. In that time, he has helped countless teachers learn ways use technology and social media in their classrooms and to build their own personal learning networks. He writes often about how to improve education in the US. Will is the person who inspired me to start my blog in 2006 when he was the SME for a course I developed.
36. Write Spot is about both technical writing and instructional design.

*This is the order I have them listed in Feedly, which is sometimes by the blog title, sometimes by the author name. There’s not a lot of consistency because I have changed my system over the years. I’m actually subscribed to about 100 more blogs than are listed here, but I filtered this list for more active blogs.

More Blogs

What other blogs do you find valuable that I should add to my list? (This is your opportunity to shamelessly promote your own blog too!) Share in the comments what blogs you read and why you appreciate them.

Filed under: Blogging, e-Learning, Instructional Design

Once in a while, an idea so revolutionary comes along that it dwarfs all other ideas. As soon as it leaves the lips of the person who whispers it, it hangs in the air as though it were beyond the laws of this world. All in the room bask in it’s near perfection, and all who witnessed the phenomenon know that their life will be changed for ever.

Such an event happened at eLearning Brothers, and we are beyond excited to give you a sneak peek of the very near future. Behold: Animal Cutouts!

It isn’t much of a mystery that baby felines dominate the internet. You likely can’t spend five minutes near a computer without getting inundated with hours of cat and Dachshund pictures, videos, or GIFs. In order to properly gussy up your eLearning and bring it in line with all of the other competing forms of online media, you will need ridiculously cute critters for your course.

Mittens

First up, we have Mittens—a young, curious kitten with a penchant for presenting. In her first pose, she is raising her cute little paw, pointing upward. Practical applications for this pose really include anything, but are not limited to the following:

• Pointing to a graphic or video
• Politely indicating that she has a question
• Gesturing toward a set of ideas laid out in bullet points

Mittens has many poses that can be used in the same vein. Mittens means business. And in business-oriented eLearning, Mittens will point things out for you. Your “aLearning” will never be the same once she on the scene.

Frank

Sometimes, you need something to help you with important messages that need to be communicated throughout your slides or training presentations. In the first image, Frank is literally on top of it. Your message is combined with his world-class doggy balance to hold the sign in landscape orientation with his left front paw gesturing to the left. This small—but “stretched out”—collection of images is a great backdrop for drawing attention to the most important issues in your course.

In the second image, we really see what a good boy Frank is as he sits on his haunches, nobly holding his sign in a portrait orientation so that you can present a set of ideas that can run a little longer. You can use either of these illustrious animal images for the following topics:

• The 10 puppy commandments of hard hat safety
• Dachshund CCNR’s
• Common stretchy dog HR complaints

Let your imagination blow up with the myriad ways that you can use these super-realistic and useful graphics.

Fynn

Finally, we have fresh little fish named Fynn, nearly the most dynamic animal one could hope for. As a master communicator, Fynn prefers to deal in absolutes, making him perfect for feedback slides. When you need to indicate correctness, it is definitely better to show Fynn’s first picture (shown above). When you need to send a message that your learner missed the mark, or you need to make it clear that they have left the beaten path, Fynn has the perfect pose to demonstrate his disappointment (shown below).

eLearning Brothers is going “all in” with these amazing animal cutouts. Over the next few days, we will be phasing out all human cutout images and replacing them with animals from every continent and job description. Even now, we are working side-by-side with leading geneticists to bring back lost populations of the dodo, the mammoth, and the snipe so that you can enjoy these animals in your eLearning courses. We have also become aware of an organization working hard to extract raptor DNA from tree sap. We’ve sent a camera crew to their island, and we’ll have behind the scenes footage hopefully in the upcoming months.

We hope you are as excited about this change of direction as we are. We really feel like this is a new breed of cutout that will take your eLearning to places you’d never imagined. If you have any concerns please feel free to email us at gotcha@elearningbrothers.com. In the meantime, you can download this preview of our Animal Cutout Library here.

The post With Animal Cutouts, Your “aLearning” Will Never Be The Same appeared first on eLearning Brothers.

The natures of work and of the workplace are evolving rapidly in response to some very specific forces. This brief article looks at one possible outcome of this evolution, presents some key concepts about three types of learning, and suggests a challenge this presents to us as learning practitioners.

During a recent Uber trip that took him close to MIT, a Slate employee received an unusual notification from the app. Under the heading Code on the Road, Uber offered him the opportunity to “Flex [his] hacker skills for a chance to chat with the Uber team.”

In what followed, he was confronted with a series of timed puzzles, all of which were part of a “Hacker Challenge” designed to test basic coding skills over the course of a ride. The first question asked him to decide “Which data structure” he would use to “dispatch the driver with the shortest ETA.” A second had him evaluating an algorithm meant “to compute all the possible routes” a driver might use to “pick up every rider.” As users have shown on Twitter, if you succeed at answering these questions, the challenge concludes with an opportunity to receive “more information on what it’s like working for Uber.”

In an email sent Friday afternoon, an Uber representative confirmed the existence of the Code on the Road initiative and suggested that it was a way of reaching out to talented coders from nontraditional backgrounds. “The option to play gives interested riders the opportunity to show us their skills in a fun and different way—whether they code on the side or are pursuing a career as a developer,” the representative wrote.

This statement, which was also sent to Business Insider, further explains that Uber deploys the option to play primarily in places “where a lot of people work in tech,” like the Boston area. Some on Twitter have suggested that it shows up during events linked to the tech world, such as SXSW, too. (The game also appears to have been deployed in Denver and Portland, Oregon, among other cities.)

Uber isn’t the first company to slyly gameify the hiring process. Google, for example, famously seeks out candidates through a semisecret coding game known as foo.bar. It shows up to those who search for certain coding-specific terms, such that—like Code on the Road—it’s embedded within the company’s services. Uber also uses the site CodeFights, which lets visitors compete to solve programming challenges, as a recruitment tool, inviting players to grapple with the sort of problems they might encounter while working for the company.

Even in this larger context, however, Code on the Road stands out for its geolocational qualities. Beyond reaching out to users in certain locations, the company doesn’t appear to have done any additional targeting. You don’t have to have expressed any interest in coding to come across it; you just have to be in the right place at the right time. That means it’s potentially making contact with those who might not consider themselves qualified to apply for a job with the company otherwise or even know that it’s hiring.

This approach squares with the hiring model that Uber has publicly embraced in the past. Discussing his company’s collaboration with CodeFights, Uber’s head of growth recruiting, Bob Cowherd, claimed that it “moves the raw-talent test piece up to the very first step in the process,” allowing the company to connect with “candidates we probably wouldn’t have found through traditional recruiting.” As the tech world continues to expand its approach to diversity hiring and its understanding of what diversity entails, efforts like this one may well become increasingly normative.

Nevertheless, charming as Code on the Road is, there may still be reason to be skeptical of it. Some advocates for diversity in tech have worried that the very word hacker may dissuade minority candidates from applying to positions in the first place, thanks to its connotations of bro-y masculinity. If that’s true, then the name “Hacker Challenge” may still be predisposing Uber to the standard pool of potential employees.

More troubling in this respect is the company’s selective deployment of the game. Since it’s only appeared thus far in locations and contexts with established tech cultures (at least, as far as I can tell), it’s more likely to help reaffirm existing hiring norms than to challenge them. While CodeFight has a broader potential reach, Code on the Road seems more likely to put Uber in touch with its competitors’ employees than it does to net them truly nontraditional candidates.

In the end, it’s possible that none of this will matter: There’s no evidence yet that Uber has actually hired anyone through its in-app initiative.

Groucho Marx once sent a telegram to a Hollywood Club he had joined. It said: 'Please accept my resignation. I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.' It was a joke of course, and a self-deprecating one at that. But it also held a subtle caveat about involvement in organisations. What happens if you subscribe to a society or club that subsequently damages your reputation? It led me to wonder about the activities some academics are currently engaged in. So I sent a Facebook status update and a tweet that said: 'I'm going to include not a TEDx speaker in my CV'. Again, it was a throw away remark, but thinking about certain conferences, I wonder perhaps if it's best that many of us aren't so involved.

TEDx is the offspring of TED Talks, and the trouble with TED talks, it is claimed, is that everything is awesome, ideas are 'worth spreading', but very little is actually remembered. They're nice videos to watch, but how much do you actually learn? For many, these events can be little more than vacuous and self-congratulatory, where presentation style takes precedence over substance. TED Talks often end with a standing ovation with the audience whooping and whistling, as the spot-light bathed speaker basks in the glory of their 16 minutes or so of fame. It seems more like a cult of celebration and celebrity than something designed to inform and challenge. What's more, I have never seen any dialogue with the audience - presumably it would be too messy and unpredictable for TED. Because no critical element is present, any idea can be presented without fear of challenge.

TED takes a lot of care over how it selects its speakers, grooming and training them to present in the style approved by TED, and only when they are ready are they let loose to entertain the paying audience. TED makes a lot of money presenting its goods in this wrapper. It's true that many of the speakers are very polished, dynamic and persuasive. I have no idea to what extent TEDx is run along similar lines, or whether it's a great departure from its bigger brother, but it seems to adopt the same format, and the main difference is that it is scaled down and appears in a venue near you.

What does speaking at a TED event do for an individual? Apparently it looks good on a CV, but so does a life-saver certificate or a stint working in a voluntary organisation. What does it actually mean? I've met and worked alongside several TED speakers, and they are genuinely nice people, but I have never met one who has been willing to talk openly about the hoops they had to jump through to become a TED speaker.

I have been approached twice for nomination as a potential TED speaker. Both times I declined. I wouldn't presume. My most memorable speaking engagements to date have been in places such as the Royal Institution, The Royal Society and numerous universities around the globe. I didn't need to do anything other than turn up and speak. I have been lucky to speak at many truly amazing events, and the larger the event, the more pressure there is on keynote speakers to entertain. But entertaining is only one small aspect of public speaking, and hopefully substance still takes precedence. For me, the most important thing is that audiences should be informed and challenged, and that whenever possible, they should be able to have dialogue with the speaker. So I will continue to speak at events when I'm invited, but I won't be speaking at a TED event, and I'm quite happy it will never appear on my CV.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons


Not a TED speaker by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

I’m sure most of you have seen your fair share of these lately:

Don’t get me wrong, I really love Instagram.  But Instagram is no longer a level playing field and this is yet another illustration of my objection to private social networks.  By private social network I mean a service (such as Instagram, Facebook, Medium, or Twitter) where all users and content live exclusively within a privately held application.

Photo streams and sharing don’t really need to be in a private social network.  They could just as easily be distributed like traditional blogs with an RSS-like syndication format.

With Instagram, we’re all at the mercy of whatever they want to do to improve their business.  Be it changing functionality, terms of service, or even shutting down.  If the above Instagram post is accurate (which I believe it is) and artists, creators, and upstarts depend on Instagram then I’d say it’s a very broken system.

We’ve talked about this before, but the beauty and security of the web is its distributed nature.  This is what’s so great about RSS.  At The Old Reader, we love our users and hope that they’ll stay forever, but if a user finds a solution that fits them better they can take their feeds and go somewhere else.

Image sharing, classifieds, blogging, microblogging and everything else that depends on content creators should work this way.  It’s the only way to keep the playing field level for creators, which I believe includes just about all of us.

One final thought…  I’m actually a fan of using algorithms to prioritize items in a queue.  I just read an interesting post by a Twitter VC firm saying how great that was going to be for Twitter.  But I think we all know the obvious truth which is that this is a revenue model.  This algorithm isn’t about showing users the most relevant content.  It’s about showing them the most relevant content PLUS any content that has been “boosted.” We stopped using Facebook for this very reason. We had thousands of followers but Facebook only showed our posts to a few hundred. If we wanted all of our followers to see a post we had to pay.

MT @hjarche: "Experiential learning is the gold standard” by @jaycross http://t.co/QaWg7AZTwi #mwl

— Jane Hart (C4LPT) (@C4LPT) April 4, 2015

from Twitter http://ift.tt/NXO91C

Human Resource Management International Digest, Volume 23, Issue 1, January 2015.

Students say Scarborough campus has become a ghost town as its operation is wound down and moved 40 miles south

Students at the University of Hull are demanding a refund of their £9,000-a-year fees over the closure of a campus that has left staff “utterly demoralised” and hundreds of undergraduates in “open revolt”.

The university’s Scarborough campus is being wound down and its operations moved 40 miles south to Hull under plans by the vice-chancellor, Prof Calie Pistorius.

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The Project Co-ordinator role within project management is an interesting one because it can mean two slightly different roles.The first type of Project Co-ordinator role is one where they are supporting a project and a project manager, much like a project support officer.

The other type of Project Co-ordinator is something much more like an Assistant Project Manager where they are co-ordinating activities and tasks on a relatively risk free and uncomplicated project. You tend to see this type of role in areas like IT implementations or Telecoms installations. The projects are much more routine – repetitive in nature – almost not a project at all but often called projects because they are unique activities for a client.

In this article we take a closer look at this latter role and uncover the top five competencies for a project co-ordinator (or project coordinator!) – skill areas that you need to concentrate on in order to do the job or, of course, get better at your job.

#1 Co-ordinating Tasks

A Project Co-ordinator’s main task is to get the job done. Co-ordinating people’s time, activities and tasks. Often the role includes a lot of equipment and materials so logistics management comes into the role a lot. There’s the updating of checklists and logs, dealing with work requests and removing the blockers that arise to stop the implementation.

A good Project Co-ordinator is highly organised, able to keep many plate’s spinning as well as being a great administrator and recorder of activity. Projects like these still need an audit trail so there is still a process to manage and follow. They’ll be great at time management and allocating time for others too. If you’re great at this basic skill of being able to co-ordinate many different tasks at the same time, you’ll be well on the way to making a successful career in this role.

#2 Planning

Like any busy project, an understanding and appreciation of the planning process is required. Project Co-ordinators also need to be able to pull together plans for work activities in order to make their co-ordination of tasks run that bit smoother.

They are expected to pull together basic schedules and create a Gantt chart of the project. They’re also expected to convey those plans to the various people they are co-ordinating. Often this means some translation for those on the team who are less familiar with project management techniques like Gantt charts. That means being able to create checklists and schedules that simplify the process.

Project Co-ordinators also have to stay on top of their plans too – incorporating issues, scope changes, budget problems, resource conflicts and so on.

#3 Other Fundamental Project Management Skills Areas

Which leads us nicely onto the wider project management skill areas too. Project Co-ordinators need to understand just as much as a Project Manager does when it comes to project management techniques, processes and methods – the only difference in application is often due to the size and risk of the project – which in this case is a lower level project.

Project Co-ordinators need to understand those fundamentals of project management, like risk management, budgeting, resource management, change control and quality.

Project Co-ordinators are often able to adapt techniques and processes – scaling them to work more efficiently on smaller less risky projects. There are often times when a Project Co-ordinator will adapt an existing process or template, creating something much simpler and easier to use. This means incorporating the knowledge from training, the on-the-job experience and recognising where there may be process bloat in their project.

#4 Third Party / Supplier Interaction

Due to the nature of these types of projects having much more equipment being ordered and installed, it stands to reason that the Project Co-ordinator will be expected to have much more interaction with suppliers and third parties to the project. Procurement, managing the budget, organising the logistics, dealing with the contracts and allocating third-party resource time are just some of the areas that the Project Co-ordinator will become involved in.

The more experienced Project Co-ordinator will have the necessary authority levels to sign the contract and approve the work. Additional training is highly recommended in legal and commercial areas.

#5 Central Point of Contact

A Project Co-ordinator brings together all these skills mentioned so far and recognises that they are the central point of contact for many different types of people, both inside and outside their own organisation. These different types of stakeholders require different types of relationships and any good Project Co-ordinator will be conscious of their own communication and relationship building skills.

One minute they can be dealing with a client query, the next a supplier who is running late, then a service operator without the right tools to do the job or a senior manager wanting the latest status report on where the project is at. Just like any role in project management, we know the people side of projects are where we should concentrate most of our efforts and for Project Co-ordinators that can mean developing and honing skills such as conflict management, negotiation, motivation and generally being a decent person that anyone on the project is happy to serve and support.

 

Project Co-ordinator roles have often been seen as an entry level role into being a Project Manager, but perhaps you can see that actually the role demands quite a bit of project management skill already. The only difference between this kind of Project Co-ordinator role and that of a Project Manager is how risky and complicated the project is. When it’s an established process and a repetitive type of project, Project Co-ordinators carry out the role perfectly well.

 

Do you agree with my top five? What differences do you see in your organisation or sector? Leave your thoughts and let’s chat about it.