Various initiative this year have led me to one point - the production of example learning activities using the main communication/collaboration tools available in the standard Virtual Learning Environment. They are engaged in the LDSE project which should be a very good, well thought through online tool to be used by educators when designing learning. What I have composed are short, succinct examples of learning activities using a particular communication/collaboration online tool. an asynchronous discussion tool: Simple Concept Discussion. For example, re. MORE >>

I'm writing this post for both attendees of the session to have some notes and for people who were not at the session to hopefully get value from the discussion that happened there. Existing Adoption At the very start I asked the audience for examples of where they were currently using these tools as part of learning solutions. Question 1 - What are the most likely ways / places your organization might or does use Blogs, Wikis, Social Bookmarking, Social Networking or Collaboration Tools? Getting Value from LinkedIn , Thomas Davenport and Blogging - He is Wrong! MORE >>

   She made the suggestion that the product managers might like to set up blogs about the new products and write regular postings to keep the sales team up to date with their development, they might describe the key functionality, show images and mockups they had built,  and of course answer any questions the sales team had about the products.  So the next step was for the Performance Consultant to show the product managers how to set up the blogs (they used freely available blogging tools for this) and how to make their postings.  MORE >>

June’s BQ is… “what tools should we learn?&#. When I think about the tools, I always come back to the fact that they are all just typing, so that is the critical thing to learn (but even that will be obsolete someday).  If I had to put together a list of specific tools for today: Blogging tool ( WordPress for me) – can cover many things – you could build a self-paced course (yes, I know we are so over the “course&# , but corporate people need them), insert hyperlinks, photos, videos, reflect and organize your thoughts and write for the web.  MORE >>

We decided to set up an ad-hoc social learning environment mostly using freely available tools. We decided to outline our curriculum in a skeletal form using a blog, and then set social interactions in the curriculum context. Blog is the watering hole A learning blog is so much a happening place! The blog has a personal touch, it is easy to follow, its updates are delivered to participant's RSS reader instantaneously. We used Blogger, the Google blogging tool. The instructor's blog posts were very short - often less than one hundred words. MORE >>