It's time for another edition of the “Learning and Development Roundup”! (See also previous editions at the archive page.)
Talking about Blended Learning
Learning and development expert Clive Shepherd recently provided a series of videos that give an extensive overview of blended learning. You can watch either the entire 43 minute interview or you can view it broken up into five parts: Foundations, Analyzing the situation, Selecting methods, Selecting media, and In conclusion. Along the way, he shares his perspective on a couple of dozen specific questions, such as: What's the case for blended learning? When is blended learning appropriate? How should someone set about designing a blended solution? How do you begin deciding which methods to use? Why start with methods rather than technologies for learning? What guarantee is there that you'll end up with a solution that is both effective and efficient?
The Working Smarter Glossary
In the April issue of Chief Learning Officer magazine, industry expert Jay Cross's column provided an outstanding resource called the "Working Smarter Glossary." Provocative even when providing an alphabetized reference, learning professionals would be wise to consider carefully Jay's perspective.
Learning and Forgetting Curves
As noted in the previous "Learning and Development Roundup," Will Thalheimer provides interesting research results in the L&D field. I noted his recent blog posting "How Much Do People Forget?," but since then he has released a very interesting video titled "Learning and Forgetting Curves -- In Depth" This is a great video for all learning professionals, from instructional designers and trainers all the way up to Chief Learning Officers.
The Latest on Mobile Learning
The past year has seen increasing interest in mobile learning -- leveraging the many mobile devices in our lives for learning and development purposes. Here are some of the best writings on this subject from the past few months:
- "m-Learning: Mobile Learning is Finally Going Mainstream – And It Is Bigger Than You Might Think" -- a new industry report by Bersin & Associates.
- "2011: The Year of the Media Tablet as a Learning Tool" -- by Jeanne C. Meister, Evgeny Kaganer, and Rick Von Feldt, in the April issue of T+D magazine. This article provides some key industry data about the rise of the iPad and other tablet devices, and their relevance for learning and development. See the link for buying the article from ASTD, as well as this blog posting by Jeanne Meister with highlights from the article.
- "The Pad and the Pod" -- a blog posting by Clark Quinn, author of the new book Designing mLearning. Here he shares some of his tentative thoughts about the differences in using a smartphone and tablet for mobile learning and support. See also his recent posting "10 Mobile Questions."
The Latest on Social Learning
There continues to be a great flow of good articles, blog postings, and resources on this popular and important subject, so I will again list a few of the best from the past couple of months:
- "Undeniable Connector" -- by Marcia Conner in the March 2011 issue of Chief Learning Officer magazine.
- "Building a Personal Learning Network (PLN)" -- Jane Bozarth's latest "Nuts and Bolts" column at Learning Solutions Magazine gives tips on how to build your personal learning network, with special emphasis on Twitter and the benefits of the weekly #lrnchat as an example.
- "Social Networks Enhance Employee Learning" -- Phaedra Brotherton's Intelligence column in the April issue of T+D magazine reports on recent survey data on the use of social media to enhance informal learning.
- "Mapping Informal and Formal Learning Strategies to Real Work" -- a blog posting by Tom Gram that provides a categorization of typical job roles into routine, technician, craft, and knowledge work areas, and then considers each in terms of learning approaches (informal learning, formal learning, performance support, and more.)
- "Should Employees Be Incented to Use Social Technologies?" -- a blog posting by Dan Pontefract, which gives a balanced consideration of a controversial but important question for any organization considering or already using social technologies.
Updates from Element K
As usual, I'll end this roundup posting with links to the latest editions of our newsletter, which include several articles of relevance to the learning and development field, as well as updates about Element K events and our latest product releases. You can see the latest newsletters here: March, April, and May.
— Thomas Stone (Tom_Stone@elementk.com and on Twitter @ThomasStone)
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