Clive on Learning

NOVEMBER 5, 2008

This might not be what McCain would have had you believe, but I will sleep much more soundly in my bed tonight now Obama has finally made it to the White House. The hostility to America that Bush has managed to engender has saddened me. Unlike many of my peers, I have always had a soft spot for America and most especially Americans. I worked for an American company for over ten years and made many very enjoyable visits as a result.

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Clive on Learning

OCTOBER 22, 2008

Although the use of Web 2.0 technologies for learning is on the up (see Learning 2.0 - an update from the eLearning Guild ), it's also true to say that most employers don't know which way to start (see How are employers responding to Gen Y and Web 2.0? ). It's therefore not surprising to see new tools enter the market that employers can more easily relate to.

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Clive on Learning

OCTOBER 20, 2008

Last Friday I was delivering a workshop for trainers. While we were chatting before the event got started, one of the participants told me that her organisation, a large government department, had initiated a major e-learning programme, but the response had been disappointing. "I bet I can guess why," I said. "Really?" she said, "Do tell me.

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Clive on Learning

SEPTEMBER 29, 2008

Continuing my review of last Friday's eLearning Network Thinking Synch event, I was surprised by several case studies that seemed to suggest that better results could be achieved in the virtual classroom than face-to-face. Hard-hitting evidence came from Illustra 's Alan Saunders, whose presentation I mentioned in my previous post. Illustra's online executive coaching programme received phenomenal feedback: "The delivery by virtual media made it even more interesting.

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Clive on Learning

SEPTEMBER 19, 2008

At the IITT National Trainers Conference it was great to see Nigel Paine make the keynote, even though he'd only five hours earlier got off a plane from Australia and was clearly feeling it. Anyway, what an effort and well appreciated by the attendees. Nigel talked about five key shifts evident in workplace learning: From courses to environments. From knowledge delivered to knowledge shared.

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Clive on Learning

AUGUST 5, 2008

Perhaps the most enjoyable session I attended at the eLearning Network's July showcase event was presented by Richard Middleton of Academy Internet. The title of the session was 'Fun & games - are they really necessary?', although a more accurate description would probably have been 'Fun & games - when are they necessary?' Richard argued that, in designing self-study e-learning, the amount of effort you should put into elaborate forms of interactivity (scenarios, sims, games) or rich med

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Clive on Learning

MARCH 31, 2008

One of my clients is considering using PowerPoint as a development tool. Although they will probably convert the PowerPoint to Flash and distribute in this way, they also want to make the PowerPoint files available for users who wish to make modifications to the materials. In investigating the various issues associated with PowerPoint, they uncovered this list of accessibility issues and some suggested solutions; they are happy that I share these with you: Accessibility challenge Disability Solu

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Clive on Learning

FEBRUARY 27, 2008

I've been immersed for a few days now in Judith Rich Harris's book No Two Alike (Norton, 2006). I'm not sure who recommended it to me but I believe it was Donald Clark. The purpose of Judith's book is to solve the mystery of human individuality - why is it that identical twins who grew up together differ in personality? What are the forces that shape our personality and our behaviour?

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Clive on Learning

DECEMBER 30, 2008

I've already decided on my new year's resolution for 2009 - it is to gain a much greater understanding of economics, particularly of the macro variety. I studied economics before at school level and did quite well; it's just that I can't remember enough of it to make any sense of what's going on at the moment. Of course it's quite possible that many economists can't either, but that itself would be interesting to find out.

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Clive on Learning

DECEMBER 29, 2008

Things you’ve already done: bold = 77 Things you want to do: italicize = 2 Things you haven’t done and don’t want to - leave in plain font = 20 1. Started your own blog. 2. Slept under the stars. Not so I remember, anyway. 3. Played in a band. Many of them, from about 13 years old, tailing off in my mid 20s. 4. Visited Hawaii. 5. Watched a meteor shower. 6.

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Clive on Learning

DECEMBER 23, 2008

Blended learning is no longer a major talking point in learning and development and perhaps that’s not such a bad thing. Bandwagons are fun when they arrive in town and they certainly make some money for those selling conferences, books, magazines and consultancy; but more often than not, when they’ve made a lot of noise parading down the main street, they disappear off into the distance, leaving behind a whole load of headaches and hangovers.

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Clive on Learning

DECEMBER 19, 2008

Thanks to Ron Orme for bringing to my attention Learning at work: e-learning evolution or revolution? , a paper published In October 2008 by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI). The paper is based on a study conducted in the UK by Professor William Scott-Jackson, Terry Edney and Ceri Rushent from the Centre for Applied HR Research at Oxford Brookes University involving an online survey of 1087 CMI members and in-depth interviews with fifteen leading public and private sector organisations.

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Clive on Learning

DECEMBER 15, 2008

I was telling Seb Schmoller today about how I had a major report to write this week and how I was desperately looking round for displacement activities that would avoid me making a start. We agreed that there were some benefits in leaving difficult tasks to the last minute: You leave yourself the maximum possible time for reflection and to allow for serendipitous connections to occur.

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Clive on Learning

DECEMBER 14, 2008

At Online Educa in Berlin, I picked up a trial copy of YawnBuster , a new product from Harbinger Knowledge Products, the makers of Raptivity. Having just experienced a particularly dire example of near death by PowerPoint (without the angels and bright lights), I was up for this. YawnBuster is a set of Flash templates that installs as a PowerPoint add-in.

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Clive on Learning

DECEMBER 13, 2008

My Xmas card to this year includes a photo I took of a snowman in Preston Park, near where I live in Brighton, in April of this year. I added some colour to the snowman so you could pick it out from the background. And, by popular request of my good friend Brent Shenkler , I am making available another of my collection of Xmas jingles, this time based on 'Deck the halls'.

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Clive on Learning

DECEMBER 10, 2008

Professional skills learning provider Cegos polled 254 senior L&D professionals during the last two weeks of November 2008. Here are my selected highlights from their findings: Forty-four percent of respondents expect their annual L&D budgets to remain the same during the next 12 months, while 24% expect budgets to increase and only 17% have plans to cut budgets in 2009.

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Clive on Learning

DECEMBER 8, 2008

At Online Educa last week I joined a lunchtime discussion led by Josie Fraser on the subject of micro-blogging. Josie's a real expert on social media and I value her opinions highly. My objective was to determine whether micro-blogging would have any value to me and I must admit I was seduced by the idea. Here's why: I really value and enjoy the status updates afforded by Facebook and would enjoy more of the same.

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Clive on Learning

DECEMBER 5, 2008

Here's a SlideShare version of the presentation I gave at Online Educa 08 in Berlin. I hope it makes some sense from the pictures alone. Change and uncertainty: The making or the breaking of corporate learning and development View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

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Clive on Learning

DECEMBER 5, 2008

Much of the discussion here at Online Educa in Berlin has been around the challenges posed by a new generation of learners, the so-called Generation Y. Given that a good half of the participants at the conference are from higher education and that, as a result, most if not all of their students are from Gen Y, makes this emphasis understandable. But for the rest of the audience, with a responsibility for workplace learning, the impact of Gen Y is only just being felt.

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Clive on Learning

DECEMBER 3, 2008

Supporting, accelerating and directing learning from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) brings together the conclusions and insights from the CIPD's Helping People Learn project'. It also brings together much of the work that Martyn Sloman has carried out as Learning, Training and Development Adviser at the CIPD as he moves on to pastures new.

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Clive on Learning

NOVEMBER 28, 2008

If you wanted to provide someone with an impression of the Wild West, you could show them an old John Wayne film, you could create a virtual frontier town in Second Life, or you could just introduce them to eBay. Over the past couple of years I have had cause to buy and sell some fairly high-ticket audio-visual items. First I bought a couple of Sennheiser radio mics that normally sell for about $750 each.

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Clive on Learning

NOVEMBER 25, 2008

An article in The Economist of November 6th entitled " Oh, grow up ", highlighted the way that blogging has entered the mainstream and explored the positive and negative implications of this. The article was prompted by the 'retirement' of A-list blogger Jason Calacanis, who complained that "blogging had become simply too big, too impersonal, and now lacks the intimacy that drew me to it.

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Clive on Learning

NOVEMBER 23, 2008

Mark Oehlert kindly invited me to contribute to the Great ILS Challenge at DevLearn 08. Now I wasn't able to get to the event, but I did submit some slides describing my ideas for a game that would "reveal the 'ethical truth' of a person" You can see my slides on SlideShare here. They should be self-explanatory. But of course the real fun is that so many others contributed quite different ideas based on their own perspectives.

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Clive on Learning

NOVEMBER 21, 2008

Back in August, I posted my Downturn Detail. As you may have noticed, the situation has moved on a bit (as Jay Cross reports, " the magnitude of the financial meltdown is almost beyond comprehension. I can foresee training departments being eliminated almost completely"),so it's probably now appropriate to upgrade my update to a 'recession report'.

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Clive on Learning

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

In his posting All of the Above - how to cheat Multiple Choice Questions , Donald Clark provides the following quote from a talk given by Professor Dylan Wiliam, Deputy Director of the Institute of Education, gave at the ALT conference in 2007: “The variability at teacher level is about four times the variability at school level. If you get one of the best teachers, you will learn in six months what an average teacher will take a year to teach you.

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Clive on Learning

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

Seeing this pic on the Thinking Worlds Blog of the team at Caspian Learning celebrating their award for best game or simulation at last Thursday's E-Learning Awards in London (and yes that's Donald Clark there on the left, joining in) reinforced for me just how much fun these events can be, particularly when you're a winner. Because it's easy to get cynical about these things, I thought I'd revisit an article I wrote on the subject back in 2004, but which seems as relevant today.

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Clive on Learning

NOVEMBER 10, 2008

Rapid development tools are by definition going to adopt a position towards the 'easy-to-use' end of the scale, even though this usually means compromising on functionality. One feature that I find I really miss is the ability to include drag and drop activities. Here's why: Drag and drop is great for testing whether learners can identify the parts of something, e.g. the bones in the body, the parts of a machine, an area on a map.

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Clive on Learning

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

I took a bit of flak about my posting The world's a safer place today , mainly from those with a different political perspective, but also from one anonymous reader who commented that he or she was "close to dropping you from my feed list, as I've had about enough of the irrelevant political commentary. Please get back to online learning, instead of pretending to be a political pundit.

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Clive on Learning

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

This weekend I'll be heading to San Jose for the eLearning Guild's DevLearn 2008 conference. Last year I managed to miss my plane and had to fly in and out in a day (see Senior Moments ). This year I hope to do a lot better and see a bit of San Francisco before attending the Adobe Learning Summit (on a press pass - it pays to be a blogger), then a workshop on scenario-based learning with Ruth Clark, before attending the conference itself.

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Clive on Learning

OCTOBER 27, 2008

A side benefit of not being able to speak at the 'e-day' run by Autonomy Multimedia last month was that I got to record my contribution on video. This has been made available by Autonomy on their e-day website. You'll find two pieces by me in the On Your Mark section. It was interesting to review again what I had to say about the effects of the current downturn on e-learning, most notably that e-learning stands to benefit more than most industries.

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Clive on Learning

OCTOBER 16, 2008

I'm enjoying my short stay in Luxembourg, even though the hotel that was booked for me turned out to be full, the taxi I took late last night was involved in a minor accident, and I managed to break my glasses. These are, of course, only minor irritants given that my hosts at Eurocontrol , the European organisation responsible for air safety, are such good company.

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Clive on Learning

OCTOBER 15, 2008

A new survey from the UK Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) asks how organisations are responding to Gen Y employees and Web 2.0 technologies. According to the report, "both CIPD members and London Business School alumni in senior positions were contacted by email to complete the online survey. A total of 488 responses were received, of which over half worked in private services, 20% worked in public services, 18% worked in manufacturing and production, and 6% worked in

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Clive on Learning

OCTOBER 14, 2008

I've been a user of Articulate Studio now for about three years. Although I have decades of experience using (and at one stage designing) more sophisticated e-learning authoring tools - you know, the highly configurable ones with their own scripting languages - I now find myself turning more and more often to the so-called rapid development tools. These do the job for me because it seems that nowadays I rarely need to create the sort of lengthy, stand-alone, highly elaborate, self-study courses

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Clive on Learning

OCTOBER 8, 2008

In the Learning Circuits Blog, the big question for October is "I'm interested in a career in e-learning. What should I do first?" My first recommendation would be to decide where it is that you see yourself fitting into the e-learning landscape - as a manager, a consultant, a salesperson for a vendor, a designer, a developer, or a moderator/instructor?

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Clive on Learning

OCTOBER 8, 2008

Last night I attended an award ceremony for the UK National Training Awards and was delighted to see one of my blended learning designs for the child development charity Plan International recognised with a national award. The Plan Certificate in Management, a one-year programme for middle and senior managers around the world, was designed in conjunction with Learning and Development Manager, Karen Coleman and course tutor, Gary Ford.

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Clive on Learning

OCTOBER 3, 2008

The eLearning Guild have recently released a new report on Learning 2.0 - Learning in a Web 2.0 World. The list of authors represents a blogging who's who, with contributions from Jane Hart , Tony Karrer , Michele Martin , Mark Oehlert , Sanjay Parker , Brent Schlenker , and Will Thalheimer. As usual with Guild reports, there's a good overall response, in this case 1160 members from 979 different organisations, of which 73% are US-based.

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Clive on Learning

OCTOBER 2, 2008

Tempted by breakfast at a top London hotel, I sat in this morning on an interesting case study presentation delivered jointly by IT training specialists Assima and corporate giant Xerox. I wasn't too familiar with Assima, even though they've been around for 24 years, but as seems to be the case with many e-learning specialists, they seem to be doing rather nicely thank you - 150+ employees, a £15m ($30m) turnover and 40% year on year growth.

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