Like millions of others I never thought apps would make much of a difference to my life but now find myself turning to them as first choice to provide a myriad of services. The point is, would you want the content to be packaged up in individual apps or accessed from a gateway app (like iTunes, iBooks or YouTube or a full-scale LMS) that provides a library of content? Creating content : Here the devices themselves provide the greatest limitations. How can this be? Well, apps tend to do one job really well with the minimum of fuss. So how far can we take the idea of apps? MORE >>

We were discussing the all-too-common tendency to over-teach and under-practise in formal workplace learning interventions.Here's how one of the participants in the meeting summarised how the principle should read: Provide just enough information to allow the learner to practise and no more I'm really taken with this. We tend to want to provide all the knowledge up front, when it's more helpful to feed it in gradually as we work through the practical exercises. It captures the idea perfectly in plain language. So what are the implications?Training Training is not education. MORE >>

Another reason you might back away from instruction as a strategy is because it is more efficient to provide how-to materials at the point-of-need - it isn't learning that's required, it's performance support: Don't get me wrong. One of the many problems I have with the term 'instructional designer' is that it implies that the only strategy of relevance to learning in the workplace is instruction. Instruction is a good strategy for algorithmic tasks - those that are based on clear rules. The trouble is that less and less of the tasks we have to perform at work are rule-based. MORE >>

Most skill-building courses, even those that devote too long to the theory, will provide some practice. I must admit I've always thought of the four-step process that sees a learner move from unconscious incompetence through conscious incompetence to conscious competence and finally unconscious competence (see the Wikipedia entry ) as an amusing play on words and not much more. In case you haven't encountered the four steps before, the idea is that the learner starts in a state of unconscious incompetence with regard to a new area of skill. They don't know what they don't know. MORE >>

If you want to benchmark your progress against that of your peers, you join groups, share your work and provide helpful critiques to others. This post continues my commentary to the Learning Insights 2012 Report produced by Kineo for e.learning age magazine. The fifth of ten 'insights' is that ‘E-learning design is changing'. For at least ten years I have been trying to broaden the use of the term 'e-learning' to include any use of technology to assist the process of learning, whether that's synchronous or asynchronous, interactive or linear, collaborative or self-study. insights MORE >>