Clive on Learning

FEBRUARY 25, 2010

I met Bert de Coutere at Online Educa in December. He chaired the Battle of the Bloggers in which I participated. Recently Bert sent me a copy of his intriguingly titled Homo Competens (Beta Book, 2009), an exploration of competence and how humans acquire this. I only got so far as page 31, when I encountered the following analysis by Bert of the stages in the building of competence: Learning If you are mainly learning, you are an apprentice.

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Clive on Learning

NOVEMBER 12, 2010

Just in case you weren’t one of the 500 at the Marriott Hotel, Grosvenor Square in London last night, here are the lucky ones for this year: Best use of mobile learning Gold Winner: Learnosity Best use of rapid e-learning content Gold Winner: Bupa Health and Wellbeing UK and Brightwave Silver Winner: Everything Everywhere Bronze Winner: ispeakuspeak Best use of synchronous e-learning Gold Winner: Hibernia College Best use of social media for learning Gold Winner: The Open University Silver Winne

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Clive on Learning

SEPTEMBER 28, 2010

I write this as I travel to Birmingham to participate in a panel discussion with Nick Shackleton-Jones and Robin Hoyle on the role of social media in learning. The discussion forms part of the agenda for the World of Learning Conference, an event that I have enjoyed participating in for something like ten years now. Anyway, this post provides me with an opportunity to clarify my thoughts in preparation for the discussion.

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Clive on Learning

JUNE 24, 2010

In a fascinating Economist article, The Lazy Medium: How people really watch television , we discover once again how rapid changes in technology are only slowly reflected in meaningful changes in behaviour. The following three extracts from the article demonstrate quite clearly how what we thought the impact of technology might be doesn’t necessarily match up to current reality: Myth 1: Viewers disregard the programme schedule But a change in expectations is not quite the same as a change in beh

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Clive on Learning

JULY 27, 2010

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 wi

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Clive on Learning

MARCH 14, 2010

An interesting article in the Technology Quarterly of The Economist, The net generation, unplugged , challenges whether there really is a new generation that has been shaped by new media technologies and which therefore sees the world in a different way and acts accordingly. "They are variously known as the Net Generation, Millennials, Generation Y or Digital Natives.

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Clive on Learning

NOVEMBER 19, 2010

Learning Light has today published its estimates for the European e-learning market. The report suggests that, in 2010, the UK market will grow by “no more that 4.76% on the 2009 figure” to a total of some £472m. I prefer to rephrase it that the UK market has grown by “as much as 4.76%”, which is not bad considering the economic conditions and the near-decimation of face-to-face training.

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Clive on Learning

FEBRUARY 23, 2010

Viv Cole drew my attention on his From the Coleface blog to an interesting article by Des Woods and Henry Marsden published recently in the UK's Training Journal called How Professionals Learn (sorry, but you'll have to pay for the download). Woods and Marsden focused their article on senior staff working in professional service firms (accountants, lawyers, etc.), but I don't see why it shouldn't also apply to senior managers, academics, doctors or anyone else who has graduated through an extens

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Clive on Learning

SEPTEMBER 3, 2010

Chris Anderson’s article The web is dead: long live the internet , in the August edition of Wired magazine, has attracted a lot of attention, including mine, but for many the title of the article would mean very little. For the past five years I have been running 1-day workshops on learning technologies for new l&d professionals, in which I include a team quiz.

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Clive on Learning

AUGUST 19, 2010

I've had a number of discussions today about what really matters when it comes to the design of effective learning content. What has emerged, at least from my point of view, is a greater clarity about the considerations that drive decision making in both design and development.It seems there are three key factors all competing for attention, and that it's very difficult to concentrate on them all: The first major consideration is the subject matter itself.

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Clive on Learning

OCTOBER 18, 2010

After close to thirty years of espousing the benefits of computer-assisted learning in its many forms, a creeping doubt is setting in. I have no doubt at all that technology affords learners many advantages - it brings them closer to millions of fellow learners, it provides access to a wealth of information - but I do doubt how meaningful learning can be when you're sat at the computer itself.

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Clive on Learning

MAY 6, 2010

Today I took part in the inaugural live online session run by the British Institute for Learning and Development (BILD). It used The Open University’s Flash Meeting platform, which was a new one for me. The session debated the following motion: ‘Online learning is more efficient than face to face training – discuss’ I happily presented the case for the motion.

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Clive on Learning

OCTOBER 12, 2010

One of the little gems I discovered in Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows relates to the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus who, in his 1512 textbook De Copia encouraged students to annotate their books, in order to mark “occurrences of striking words, archaic or novel diction, brilliant flashes of style, adages, examples and pithy remarks worth memorising”.

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Clive on Learning

JULY 2, 2010

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’.

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Clive on Learning

NOVEMBER 24, 2010

Is social networking addictive, like caffeine, alcohol, nicotine and narcotics? The only test would be to try and wean yourself off and see what happens. Would you break out in cold sweats, suffer headaches or panic attacks? Or,much worse, would you cease to exist. Are we all fighting against solipsism (the belief that only the self exists, or can be proved to exist).

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Clive on Learning

OCTOBER 25, 2010

A recent article in The Economist entitled Learning difficulties describes a paradox of educational research which is that when you present information in a way that looks easy to learn it often has the opposite effect. According to the article: "Numerous studies have demonstrated that when people are forced to think hard about what they are shown they remember it better.

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Clive on Learning

JULY 28, 2010

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.

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Clive on Learning

DECEMBER 1, 2010

The Towards Maturity 2010 Benchmark Report has confirmed what you would have expected to come out of a severe recession in terms of e-learning. Here's my interpretation: Live, group, face-to-face courses are being converted lock, stock and barrel into self-paced, self-directed, online courses as a panic solution to a lack of funds. This is allowing most of those working in e-learning to maintain business as usual and in some cases to grow their revenues.

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Clive on Learning

DECEMBER 14, 2010

According to US News , Training Specialist (note the old-fashioned but nevertheless still largely accurate job title) is one of the to best careers for 2011, at least in the US. That's good news for all of you out there who fell foul of the recession. Here are some other interesting snippets from the article: Prospects (US figures): Employment is expected to jump by 50,500 jobs, or more than 23 per cent, to 267,000 jobs by 2018, the Labor Department reports.

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Clive on Learning

JULY 22, 2010

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.

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Clive on Learning

JULY 15, 2010

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.

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Clive on Learning

AUGUST 11, 2010

FastestTube is a browser extension that currently works with Chrome, Firefox and Safari (IE version on the way). It sits in YouTube and allows you to download any video in a number of formats: This is a really useful facility. Previously I’ve used Voobys to perform this function but, by comparison, it’s a pretty untidy process. I like to have downloaded copies of my favourite videos so I can use them in presentations and workshops without needing to be online.

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Clive on Learning

MAY 20, 2010

The May Big Question in the Learning Circuits Blog is What will workplace learning technology look like in 2015 ? My first instinct was to pass on this one, because it seems only a few months since we made our predictions for 2010. But this asks us to look a little further out, to a time when economies will hopefully be back on the up and when new media really will be ubiquitous.

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Clive on Learning

APRIL 12, 2010

One of the benefits from my regular tussles on the tennis court with Steve Rayson of Kineo is the intelligence we get to share on the elearning marketplace as we attempt to recover our composure at the finish. This time Steve alerted me to some research that Forrester has been doing for Adobe on the development of rapid elearning in the USA. This research was summarised in a webinar run by Claire Schooley of Forrester for Adobe in March.

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Clive on Learning

JANUARY 20, 2010

There was some consternation on Twitter about the results of the survey that Alison Rossett and James Marshall conducted with 968 ASTD and eLearning Guild members in mid 2009. As the authors point out, if you went by the themes of most l&d conferences, blogs and magazines, then you’d believe the classroom was in terminal decline and that self-paced e-learning tutorials were being fast replaced by games, sims, 3D worlds, and all forms of social and collaborative learning, much of it mobile.

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Clive on Learning

AUGUST 2, 2010

Writing on Mashable, Jennifer Grove announces that you can Become the Master of Any Subject with a Suite of New iPhone Apps. Using the new series of quiz apps from KnowPro , the world of learning is at your fingertips. The strategy is simple: "Each app tutors users by testing them with quiz questions. At the beginning of each randomized quiz, you can set how many questions you want to answer.

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Clive on Learning

DECEMBER 10, 2010

I have come to the realisation that blogging is a key strategy for coping with information anxiety - the stress you feel when trying to take advantage of what seems like a never-ending stream of interesting leads to follow-up online. In fact not just online, because TV, newspapers, books and magazines haven't gone away - the online stuff comes on top of all this.

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Clive on Learning

DECEMBER 7, 2010

Last week I attended a very enjoyable meeting of the NHS Wales E-Learning Network.One of the presentations was by John Hallam of the NHS Wales Informatics Service. John is a specialist in specifying and tracking the benefits from new IT systems (a role that's particularly important given the poor track record of major IT projects in the UK public sector).

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Clive on Learning

SEPTEMBER 1, 2010

I need your help. I’m working on a book about architecture, but not in the conventional sense. I’m looking at learning architects, those who design environments for learning in the workplace. I want to interview a cross-section of pioneering learning architects from across the world to try and ascertain their vision for learning and development at work and how successful they have been in implementing this within their organisations.

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Clive on Learning

AUGUST 26, 2010

The BBC news website describes a new Ofcom report which surveyed 1138 adults in the UK to determine how they spend their time, in particular the media they consume. The findings are startling. The statistics suggest people in the UK spend seven hours a day – almost half their waking lives - "engaging in media and communications activities" The article goes on: “However, the average person actually squeezes in the equivalent of nearly nine hours of media and communications by multi-task

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Clive on Learning

AUGUST 23, 2010

In an interview with MediaBistro , Seth Godin declares that he has given up on writing books. With 12 in the bag, he no longer thinks that the traditional publishing process is “worth the effort”. “I like the people, but I can’t abide the long wait, the filters, the big push at launch, the nudging to get people to go to a store they don’t usually visit to buy something they don’t usually buy, to get them to pay for an idea in a form that’s hard to spread,” he says.

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Clive on Learning

JULY 19, 2010

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 ( [link] ), 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.

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Clive on Learning

MARCH 26, 2010

In a rare training-related article in People Management magazine, Evaluating Performance Gain from Training , my attention was drawn to an interesting study conducted by training outsourcing specialists KnowledgePool , with input from more than 10,000 learners and their managers over a three year period. The data was collected from an online survey issued three months after the completion of training, and focuses on the degree to which the transfer of learning has taken place and the effect this

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Clive on Learning

MARCH 2, 2010

A month back I had the fortune of being asked to present to CEdMA, an association of senior training managers in large IT companies who have the responsibility for training up their organisations’ customers in their various products. It was clear from their discussion that the market was changing: Customers are demanding shorter courses. Customers are demanding more online delivery.

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Clive on Learning

JANUARY 5, 2010

In December of 2008 I started using Twitter on a three-month trial basis. At the end of this period I reviewed my experience and devided to continue (see Three months a-Twittering ). Just before Christmas I reached the one year milestone, at the same time posting my 1000th tweet and gaining my 1000th follower. So, what has all this activity achieved?

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Clive on Learning

SEPTEMBER 14, 2010

I've been listening in to some of the royalty-free music at jewelbeat.com. This stuff is completely free for use even on commercial projects and produced to a very high standard. My contact with library music in the past has been as soundtrack to corporate videos and that was a long time ago, so music in so far as it relates to e-learning is not a connection I've explored in any detail.

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Clive on Learning

SEPTEMBER 8, 2010

The flight from London to Newcastle this afternoon provided an ideal opportunity to remove one book from the pile accumulating on my desk. Not only did I accomplish this, I still had time for an exorbitantly expensive cup of tea and a KitKat. The book I chose was, to be fair, a short one, the intriguingly titled Open Source Instructional Design by Nathan Eckel (IntelliDesign, 2009).

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