In my search for something to write about this month I stumbled upon an article in Wired magazine entitled “ Clive Thompson on Memory Engineering.” The gist of it is that a new service called 4SquareAnd7YearsAgo will summarize and e-mail your Foursquare “check-ins” from one year ago, resulting in, as Thompson calls it, “a curiously powerful daily jolt of reminiscence.”. My first reactions to this were the following: Who uses Foursquare? Anyone? Why would someone really care about remembering minutiae from a year ago? So this “service” sounds a little like my worst nightmare. Idealistic, yes. MORE >>

Oh, those fateful words. The ones that you wish you could call back and place deep in the confines of your brain, as far away from consciousness as possible: “In my next blog I’ll discuss some of the challenges related to mobile learning development, and suggest some solutions.”. What a blithe, naïve promise. Woe is me! OnlineColleges.net came to the rescue with their post The 10 Biggest Downsides to Mobile Learning. Although this article is directed at leveraging mobile learning in a school environment, some of the concerns they raise are transferable to the world of business. Compatibility. MORE >>

Tom Gram, one of my favorite bloggers, a few years ago responded to the hue and cry about ADDIE’s demise in the field of instructional design. In ADDIE is DEAD! Long Live ADDIE! he talked about the love/hate relationship that many instructional designers and eLearning developers have had with ADDIE as they tried to keep up with business demands for speed and quality and as they observe process innovations such as rapid application development and iterative prototyping. For many years the five ADDIE phases were the foundation for the design of most systems. ADDIE vs. Rapid Prototyping. Sources. MORE >>

One of the concepts in training that has taken the biggest strides this year has been that of the “flipped classroom.” My colleague Jon Matejcek first covered it back in March in his article “ Online Academy Helps to Keep Lectures Where They Belong: Out of the Classroom.” Essentially, the idea is to upend the traditional teaching model of classroom lecture followed by personal practice at home. Instead, instructors can deliver lectures via YouTube as homework, and then spend the next day in class helping their pupils work through sticking-points. million, respectively. MORE >>

Introduction to AR. Augmented reality (AR), as defined by the infallible Wikipedia, is a live, direct or indirect, view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data.  It differs from virtual reality in that it modifies the real world instead of replacing it with a simulated one. Like many of you, my first look at augmented reality (AR) came via 80s action movies (e.g. Robocop and Terminator).  These half-man, half-machines were seen to have superpowers, due in large part to their AR.  MORE >>