Saffron Interactive, one of Europe’s leading e-learning, mobile and blended learning companies, is proud to announce that Stephanie Dedhar has been named Instructional Designer of the Year at the IT Training Awards 2010. Chief executive of the Institute of IT Training, Colin Steed, described the event as an ‘annual celebration of outstanding achievement, best practice, and excellence in IT training.’ The instructional designer category was new for the 2010 awards, which were announced at a gala dinner held at The Dorchester in London on Thursday 4 February.

Last week I gave a seminar with my colleague Jennifer at Learning Technologies 2010 on the subject of social learning. The theme of Saffron’s stand at the event was also social learning and, despite the lack of smoothies this year, attracted a lot of attention. So, social learning: is it just the latest buzzword or is it something that’s worth taking seriously? We were pleasantly surprised to see a large audience spilling over into the aisles and (bar a few microphone issues) our presentation seemed to go down well. All in all, over the two days I spent a lot

That the LMS needs to incorporate social learning elements is no longer a point of debate but both a question of survival for the LMS itself and also a test of how the LMS handles the balance of both the elements of training and the ‘networkedness’ of the social learning .  d like to differ; the UpsideLMS comes with a unique social learning framework that lets users actually access such social tools from within the LMS in a robust and secure environment for connecting to and sharing with fellow users. We’ve been hearing of experts commenting that LMSs today don’t come with appropriate social media technology built in. We’d