I’ve been working on some learning related material for children. Designing for children is a totally different ballgame from the workplace learning we are typically involved in. To put it mildly, designing for children is tough; to design for today’s children even tougher. The more I look at this demographic they call ‘digital natives’, I find individuals who take the digital world the internet enables for granted. To these individuals, the internet and its data services are just as mundane as electricity and phones were to us in older generations. Digital natives have short attention spans. MORE >>

It is easy to get in a position where you feel obliged to take a stance on some aspect or other of learning and development in the workplace – in particular when it comes to challenges to the status quo. Typically you’re either with the old way or the new. ve never found this particularly helpful, as there are usually plenty of good arguments on either side. The issue, as ever, is getting the balance right between taking advantage of new developments as they come available, while continuing to exploit the potential of long-standing approaches. This slider may seem a little confusing. MORE >>

Our learning experience design is focused, essentially, on achieving one particular learning objective. At the level of curricular design, we are then looking at sequences of learning objectives that lead to aggregate competencies. And these are delivered as punctate events. But with mobile technologies, we have the capability to truly start to deliver what I call ‘slow learning’: delivering small bits of learning over time to really develop an individual. It’s a more natural map to how we learn; the event model is pretty broken. But can we do better? MORE >>

Better Beginnings: How to attract students’ attention in 30 seconds or less. Presented by Dr. Carmen Taran. Thanks to the eLearning Guild. Official description: Information overload, tripletasking, hyperchoice, and short attention spans are just a few of the symptoms of the modern client. Because so many forces compete for one’s focus, we often need to catch students’ attention in a matter of seconds. Join this presentation to learn how to construct better beginnings of your messages so that you attract attention in 30 seconds or less. These are my live blogged notes from the session. MORE >>

Clark Quinn has been talking up the concept of “slow learning.” I love this concept. He’s expounded on it a bit in his newest book Designing mLearning. Recognizing that natural learning is not an event, but a process that develops over time, the question is whether we can take a slower, more thorough approach to developing learners.” As a metaphor, think of drip irrigation versus the typical watering paradigm, a flooding. Instead of a massive dump of information that will evaporate, how about just a little bit at a time, reinforced (spaced learning, as above). 190-191. MORE >>