Dr Jane Bozarth

I attended an excellent presentation at the Sydney LEARNX conference last week. Keynote speaker was Dr Jane Bozarth and she had some great insights into the direction that learning is taking:
1. She asked if we all know who Ivy Bean is. She is the oldest known person who is on twitter and she tweets about the goings-on in her aged care facility. She has 45000 followers reading about what she eats and does all day. Lesson - a lot has changed in terms of how we communicate and this has a flow-on effect into the way in which we learn.
2. Farmville, a game I do not play on facebook, has 3 times more players than people than live in Australia. Lesson - we can deliver whole training programs now via facebook. We can tweet the pre-work and we can follow-up in facebook groups. In this way we don't have to pull participants so hard because some learners are already using these social media mechanisms already.
3. What are the types of activities that you are using in your current learning that you can replicate in some way for on-line training? You can for example use discussion boards. You can set questions that stimulate discussion and place them on discussion boards to get people talking. Traditional elearning has not yet captured these tools.
4. We really need to re-imagine our roles as trainers. People are learning all the time without us even being there! The traditional boundaries are starting to fade and we are no longer in the classroom or training room business. We are in the learning business.
5. Companies who do not allow teams to access sites such as Youtube and so on need to consider this - trust is cheaper than control.

Elearning

I attended a most wonderful session today conducted by Edna.edu.au - the online network for educators.
I would encourage all trainers to join up - it is free - and enjoy some of the benefits of being part of this on-line community.
As Mark Twain once said,"I wanted my son to get a good education, so I took him out of school." There is so much that is new and happening on-line in education and training, that it seems such a pity to be conducting training using the same old techniques in the classroom.
I am so pleased that at Management Consultancy International we are going to be exploring how we can integrate some of the new tools into our sessions. We have already started by using video to capture sessions and ensure that the in-house groups receive a copy so that they can refresh at a later date or observe how they interact with others.
We are also going to be looking at using some of these tools as well:
1. Podcasts and hopefully picture podcasts
2. Some videocasts as well
3. Seeing how we can use Wikipedia in the sessions
4. Including Utube videos in our blog
5. Perhaps investigating Second Life as an education forum
6. Introducing an RSS feed.
As soon as I have my head around moodles, breadcrumbs, js tools and feedreaders, we will be moving Management Consultancy International and our clients way into the 21st century of learning. So watch this space....