Comments on Bunchberry & Fern: Back-to-front eLearning: scaling your jackasses

Online collaborating and teaching can work, If you...

2010-02-03T12:07:39.610Z

Online collaborating and teaching can work, If you have trust and the right tools.
I recently tried http://www.showdocument.com - good app for uploading documents and working on them in real-time.
Most file types are supported and it needs no installation. - andy

I'm with usablelearning, WNYC Radio Lab might ...

2010-01-25T22:34:07.570Z

I'm with usablelearning, WNYC Radio Lab might be at the top of my list.

Why not combine both? Whilst learning styles has t...

2010-01-19T23:09:26.591Z

Why not combine both? Whilst learning styles has taken a beating lately, I would still argue that somewhat unstructured,undefined and digressive learning domains (which sounds like the end state of an intranet page you describe) would suit some learners, but not others.

While the world is messy and you cant control it, people moslty still like to try and sequenced, bounded, simplistic instruction makes some people feel more secure and 'threat to self' is a major barrier to learning.

Why not have the the instructionally sound self paced elearning that is simplistic, but does provide models and representations (and acknowldege its shortcommings to learners), then at key points in the sequence offer opportunities for unbounded, speculative and self-directed learning in which the learners test the representations in complex environments.

Thus you get the best of both worlds, nice neat little cognitive cookies being cut from the same dough and then big scary constructivist shark infested waters in which learners can test and expand upon thier learning. Please excuse my horrible mixed metaphors.

Also, adding to the examples of simplistic eLearning like software simulation are things like udnerpinning theory for sales, frontline management and stuff like that.

For example, doing a 5 step process for making a sale delivered online creates a foundation (a common starting point, lexicon etc) from which people can explore its application in a complex environment.

While "This American Life" is on my
2010-01-14T18:27:27.219Z
While "This American Life" is on my top ten podcasts, my favorites are actually TWIT (This Week In Tech), Groks Science Radio Show, and On the Media.
Also, I believe Louis Henri Sullivan's quote is actually, "Form ever follows function." If you omit the "ever", it implies they are not intricately linked together. For example, you wind up with the typical straight back kitchen chair. But when form and function are shown that they are indeed intricately linked together, then the design takes a closer look at the user. Since the human body has no straight lines, the chair’s form becomes curvey, such as Herman-Miller's Aeron chair, which fits the function of ergonomic.
This carries on to learning design. Omit the "ever" and the benefits of elearning becomes scalability, eliminating travel costs, etc. However, intricately link them together and we see the real forms are allowing the learners to learn at their own pace. Thus slower learners can master the material and tasks while the faster learners do not waste their time waiting for others to catch up with them.
Keeping the form and function intricately linked and we see there needs to be some form of social learning, thus we now have a blend. Carry the blend farther and we have something quite different; and this radically different look can turn people off at first. For example, when people were first shown Herman-Miller's Aeron chair, they thought the design was not complete because it looked quite different from any other chair. Most would comment that it should be a nice chair when the design is completed. However, it was not until they actually used the chair for a while that they actually found the design or style quite compelling - the curvilinear looks gives it both a visual and tactile metaphor of the human form that gives its unique form or "style."
There are some people who have natural talents to do instructional/learning design; however, just like any other craft or profession, MOST CANNOT. Which is why there is so much crappy design out there. So unless you have one of these rare and naturally talented learning designers then you do indeed need qualified learning designers.

What Dave said, too (many similar thoughts - thank...

2010-01-14T03:00:44.077Z

What Dave said, too (many similar thoughts - thanks Dave!)

Also - LMSs are horrible things. Won't go into it here, but they are a mass hallucination on the part of the e-Learning industry.

Also - "The eLearning should protrude onto and overlap with the real world. The form follows the function." < YES. Totally stealing that.

&%&@!%&%@&*!!!! CRAP. I just ...

2010-01-14T02:54:05.934Z

*&%&*@!%&*%@*&*!!!!

CRAP. I just typed a 300 word response and lost it through a browser hiccup.

Won't recreate it now, but here's the highly condensed version:

- Simulations and practice = good use of e-Learning (depending on context)

- It's a tool. It can be useful in the same way as other tools (wikis, web pages, etc.)

- Really good instructional designer can be like a really good teacher and make the material sing. Both are rarer than they should be.

- WNYC Radiolab v This American Life cage match: Radiolab wins (imho - doesn't mean that I don't love TAL, though)

Will try again tomorrow - should ponder anyway.

You've got some valid points here. E-learning...

2010-01-14T02:06:49.422Z

You've got some valid points here. E-learning, like mainframe CBT before it, suffers from a cognitive version of Gresham's Law: bad training drives out good.

To many large-scale organizations, the benefits of distance learning (in whatever form) derive mainly from avoiding travel costs. That's pretty much it. You can get some additional, squishy savings by avoiding replacement costs (not that they'd replace you while you were gone) and by trying to cram structured learning onto the beginning or end of the work day...

But mostly it's the travel. I say this because travel cost is a hard item (airfare, hotel, meals, registration fees). So when you turn the three-day workshop that 1,000 people take into some online version, you save a thousand airfares, at least three thousand hotel nights--that's real money. Spent it last year, don't have to this year.

Which is why, once you've got any kind of asynchronous platform, people load all kinds of nonsense onto the platform: it's cheap.

The allure of an LMS, to senior management, consists of (a) better counting of selected beans and (b) the illusion that what gets counted somehow relates to learning.

And sometimes it does. Let's take a reservation system, something I know about. Say your organization has 2,000 reservation clerks by various titles, and 20% annual turnover. You need to train 400 people a year in the basics of the interactions. Online training isn't a bad way to handle that. I've lead design teams for passenger rail and hotel reservation systems. We had good simulation, lots of interaction, and when people completed the courses, they could use the systems.

The complexity, as you suggest, arises when people need to integrate the essentially procedural skills (how much is the fare? is space available? does property X have feature Y?) into broader customer-service contexts.

Maybe I'm just more skeptical about those jobs that "have been or soon will be outsourced." I have a hunch that many jobs still have and always will retain a procedural component. I agree that far too many designers (and the organizations they work for) have taken far too many people on dumbed-down field trips ("this is the name field...you enter the name here...this is the address field...").

Does the word "outsourcing" means "oh, good, I don't have to train folks in procedures?" Possibly so, if your company is putting the hard-cost cart in front of the customer-satisfaction horse. Or possibly so if you decide it's somebody else's job to train those people.