Upcoming Featured Presentation at e-Learn Conference in Montreal

Really Ready for Prime Time?  A Framework for Considering the Practical Challenges Facing “Game-Changing” Educational Technologies

Scheduled: 

e-Learn 2012Thursday, October 11Sheraton Hotel
Montreal, Quebec

Will MOOCs really change the game in higher education?  Will social media really change the way we teach?  And by the way, did computers really change the classroom experience?  British sociologist Neil Selwyn argues that, because educational technology “is essentially a positive project,” it tends to focus only on the positive and that gets in the way of “mak[ing] these technologies happen.”  He suggests, instead, that educational technologists “engag[e] actively with the negative aspects of education and technology and explor[e] how best to withstand them.”  This session explores how to do so.  Through an interactive activity, participants experience roadblocks in implementing a new educational technology.  Through the debriefing of that activity, I present a research-based framework that educational technologists can use to identify contextual, educational, and financial challenges that might affect the implementation of a technology, illustrate the framework with the cases of real-world technologies, and suggest how to appropriately communicate those challenges when discussing new educational technologies with various stakeholders

Reminder: Textbook Suggestions for Instructional Design Courses

For those of you whom are university-level instructors, consider these titles as possible texts for your courses:

Book	Description	Suitable Courses
Training Design Basics (ASTD Press)	This book emphasizes the real-world nature of designing training programs, working with the time and resources available. Yes, trainers have to analyze needs and write objectives (after all, each trainer needs to know what they are training and why they are doing so). But often the time is limited to perform, so this book suggests ways to get the information even if they don’t have the time or access to all of the people who might be helpful. Similarly, although e-learning and other forms of instruction receive much attention in the professional literature, the bulk of training continues to be designed for the classroom. This book makes that assumption, and offers specific suggestions for preparing classroom courses and workbooks. Finally, after designing and developing courses, most trainers have responsibility for the successful launch and running of those courses. This book explores those issues, too, specifically identifying issues in administering, marketing, and supporting courses so that they are likely to be effective.	Instructional Design Designing Training Programs
Advanced Web-Based Training (by Margaret Driscoll and Saul Carliner, Pfeiffer)	This book takes instructional designers to the next level in their design journeys. It provides instructional designers, e-learning developers, technical communicators, students, and others with strategies for addressing common challenges that arise when designing e-learning programs. Balancing educational theory with the practical realities of implementation, Driscoll and Carliner outline the benefits and limitations of each strategy, discuss the issues surrounding the implementation of these strategies, and illustrate each strategy with short scenarios drawn from real-world online learning programs representing a wide variety of fields including technology, financial services, health care, and government. Some of the specific design challenges this book addresses include learning theory for e-learning, m-learning, simulations and games, interactivity, communicating visually, writing for the screen, preparing introductions and closings, mentoring and coaching e-learners, and blended learning.	Advanced Instructional Design Studio courses in e-learning Advanced Technical and Professional Communication
e-Learning Handbook (edited by Saul Carliner and Patti Shank, Pfeiffer)	This book is an essential resource that is filled with original contributions from the world’s foremost e-learning experts including Jane Bozarth, Patrick Lambe, Tom Reeves, Marc Rosenberg, and Brent Wilson. The book offers a comprehensive and up-to-date review of the economic, technological, design, economic, evaluation, research, and philosophical issues underlying e-learning. Each chapter includes a chart that summarizes the key take-away points, contains questions that are useful for guiding discussions, and offers suggestions of related links, books, papers, reports, and articles.	Advanced Instructional Design Seminar in Learning

To order and receive more information, either contact your publisher’s representative or visit http://www.amazon.com/Saul-Carliner/e/B001H9RDXU/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_pop.

Some Textbook Suggestions

For those of you whom are university-level instructors, consider these titles as possible texts for your courses:

Book	Description	Suitable Courses
Training Design Basics (ASTD Press)	This book emphasizes the real-world nature of designing training programs, working with the time and resources available. Yes, trainers have to analyze needs and write objectives (after all, each trainer needs to know what they are training and why they are doing so). But often the time is limited to perform, so this book suggests ways to get the information even if they don’t have the time or access to all of the people who might be helpful. Similarly, although e-learning and other forms of instruction receive much attention in the professional literature, the bulk of training continues to be designed for the classroom. This book makes that assumption, and offers specific suggestions for preparing classroom courses and workbooks. Finally, after designing and developing courses, most trainers have responsibility for the successful launch and running of those courses. This book explores those issues, too, specifically identifying issues in administering, marketing, and supporting courses so that they are likely to be effective.	Instructional Design Designing Training Programs
Advanced Web-Based Training (by Margaret Driscoll and Saul Carliner, Pfeiffer)	This book takes instructional designers to the next level in their design journeys. It provides instructional designers, e-learning developers, technical communicators, students, and others with strategies for addressing common challenges that arise when designing e-learning programs. Balancing educational theory with the practical realities of implementation, Driscoll and Carliner outline the benefits and limitations of each strategy, discuss the issues surrounding the implementation of these strategies, and illustrate each strategy with short scenarios drawn from real-world online learning programs representing a wide variety of fields including technology, financial services, health care, and government. Some of the specific design challenges this book addresses include learning theory for e-learning, m-learning, simulations and games, interactivity, communicating visually, writing for the screen, preparing introductions and closings, mentoring and coaching e-learners, and blended learning.	Advanced Instructional Design Studio courses in e-learning Advanced Technical and Professional Communication
e-Learning Handbook (edited by Saul Carliner and Patti Shank, Pfeiffer)	This book is an essential resource that is filled with original contributions from the world’s foremost e-learning experts including Jane Bozarth, Patrick Lambe, Tom Reeves, Marc Rosenberg, and Brent Wilson. The book offers a comprehensive and up-to-date review of the economic, technological, design, economic, evaluation, research, and philosophical issues underlying e-learning. Each chapter includes a chart that summarizes the key take-away points, contains questions that are useful for guiding discussions, and offers suggestions of related links, books, papers, reports, and articles.	Advanced Instructional Design Seminar in Learning

To order and receive more information, either contact your publisher’s representative or visit http://www.amazon.com/Saul-Carliner/e/B001H9RDXU/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_pop.

Informal Learning in the News

Social media has sparked interest in informal learning; the topic is addressed throughout Informal Learning Basics.

 I recently came across some articles online that clearly and effectively introduce some popular tools. Although the articles are written for members of the academic community, they’re actually valuable to anyone interested in learning more about these tools:

• Utilizing Pinterest as a Learning Tool by Rochelle McWhorter, published in the June 2012 issue of the Academy of Human Resource Development (AHRD) digest describes the excitement generated by Pinterest—a social bookmarking tool that McWhorter identifies as a “social bookmarking tool” and is the “third most-used social media [sic] behind Facebook and Twitter,” then suggests ways that readers might use Pinterest. To see the article (membership might be required), visit http://ahrd.org/displaycommon.cfm?an=1&subarticlenbr=179. 
• Why are you on Twitter? By Liz Meyer and published on the Freire Project blog, explains not only why Meyer uses Twitter, but then proceeds to provide a primer on how to use Twitter. She explains the @ and # symbols, how to organize tweets, and Twitter etiquette. View the blog post at http://www.freireproject.org/blogs/why-are-you-twitter.

Informal Learning Basics Now Available

Informal Learning Basics has officially been published by ASTD Press.  

If you are an ASTD member, you might have received an announcement about the book through email. If not, here’s the notice.

Informal Learning Basics explores one of the hottest topics in training today.  It describes how training and development and other Human Resources professionals can better harness informal learning.  By some accounts, informal learning—in which learners define some combination of the process, location, purpose, and content of learning and may or may not be conscious that learning occurred—provides as much as 70 percent of all learning in the workplace with little or no involvement of training and development professionals.  

So readers have realistic expectations and plans for the application of informal learning in the workplace, the book first describes how informal learning works and identifies how to use it effectively at key touch points in the life cycle of a job.  Then, to help readers harness the power of informal learning, this book describes how readers can support 22 specific types of group and individual informal learning,  how social, enterprise and other instructional technologies can assist in those efforts, and how to evaluate informal learning.  Each chapter includes exercises that help readers apply the concepts presented in the book and worksheets that readers can use when planning informal learning efforts in their organizations.

To find out what type of informal learner you are, check out the next post on this blog.  

To order, visit http://saulcarliner.blogspot.com/2012/05/order-books-including-informal-learning.html 

Avoiding Assumptions When Writing

..most books on writing and instructional design emphasize the importance of knowing your learners — not on the use of that knowledge in the choice of sentences and phrases to avoid offending them...

Check out my new article on avoiding assumptions in writing in Learning Solutions Magazine at http://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/833/avoid-making-assumptions-that-backfire?utm_campaign=lsmag&utm_medium=email&utm_source=lsm-news

Technology and the Schools in the Popular News

Technology and the schools has made the popular news on both sides of border in the past week or so.

On the one hand, the Globe and Mail has run a special section on education, with a discussion of the need to re-design primary, secondary, and tertiary education to take advantage of the technologies now available for teaching. 

On the other hand, the New York Times has published a couple of articles raising the red flags about all-online schools.  The first appeared in Gail Collins' column, in which she raises a red flag about too much technology in primary and secondary education, specifically raising concerns about the tendency for many states to outsource online school programs to the for-profit company, K12 Inc.--and the lack of research evidence on the effectiveness for children of learning full-time in an online environment.

She’s right to raise that flag. Although the research is clear that online learning is at least as effective as classroom learning, none of the studies were conducted in full-time, long-term environments.  Studies of long-term, full-time effects would, by necessity, need to look at side effects of learning, such as the effects on social development of spending most class time on the computer rather than with other children.

She also raised a red flag about the sales pitch used to generate enrollments in these online programs, positioning “online learning as an alternative to a violent in-school experience.”  See her column at  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/03/opinion/virtually-educated.html?src=recg.)

The Times  followed with an in-depth of the for-profit charter school industry this Monday.  Profits and Questions at Charter Schools by Stephanie Saul provides an-depth exploration of online charter schools, suggesting that they perform better on Wall Street than Main Street.  Among the measures on which the schools are underperforming include student-teacher ratios, churn rate (numbers of students enrolling then transferring out), and all-important standardized tests.

The article concludes that K12, one of the leading for-profit companies running these schools "a portrait emerges of a company that tries to squeeze profits from public school dollars by raising enrollment, increasing teacher workload and lowering standards."

View the entire article at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/education/online-schools-score-better-on-wall-street-than-in-classrooms.html?src=recg&pagewanted=all.

The common themes underlying all of these articles are that technology in the schools is still viewed as something separate and something to be viewed with suspicion, and that some of the implementations of technology--intended to promote its virtues--only deepen those initial concerns.  

Alternative to Blackboard and Moodle?

Fast Company reporter and Do-It-Yourself college education advocate Anya Kamenetz reports on Coursekit, a free online application that is positioning itself as a more student- and teacher-friendly alternative to market leader Blackboard.  

Kamenetz focuses her December 5 article in Fast Company on the business model used by Coursekit.  Coursekit is available free and ad-free for the next year (its first year in operation).  After that, it will continue to be free (that’s its value proposition) but could feature ads as a means of generating revenue.  

To provide background, Kamenetz notes that Coursekit was developed by some dropouts from the undergraduate program at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania to provide an easier-to-use experience than Blackboard.  (I had actually read this before; whomever is launching this company has hired a great PR firm.)

That intrigued me, because when Blackboard first hit the scene a bit over a decade ago, its ease of use was the key to its success.  Instructors could easily create course websites without knowing anything about HTML or Dreamweaver.  All they had to do was upload Word, Powerpoint and Excel documents, and fill in a few templates.

But after a semester or two of work, Blackboard looked clunky and I returned to writing my own course websites in HTML.  

After it established itself in the market, other educational technologists, too, tired of Blackboard.  Blackboard and its then competitor WebCT dramatically raised their prices, added a host of features that only a few teachers needed, and drove many schools to the open-source competitor, Moodle.  Moodle operates similarly to Blackboard and offers similar functions, but the software is open source so organizations avoid licensing fees.  I use Moodle but mostly for its privacy capabilities or when I'm told to; my feelings about the application and its usability are neutral. 

So Kamenetz's article--the second I had seen in a week about Coursekit--piqued my curiosity.  I wanted to see whether Coursekit was easier to use.

So I checked it out myself and created a simple course website.  Its interface is cleaner, using a social media feed rather than the announcement boards typical of its predecessors.  The gradebook and submissions processes look much simpler than Blackboard and Moodle.

What I liked the best was the calendar function, which lets instructors present all of the materials needed for a single session together.  I also appreciated the privacy settings, that let instructors keep some parts public and others private.  In terms of usability, the product seems to live up to its promise (won’t know until I use it under the real pressures of a term).

But, as Kamenetz notes, how Coursekit handles advertising could make or break the product.  Read her article at http://www.linkedin.com/news?actionBar=&articleID=961161750&ids=0TdzoOcPoOdzAIc3kTcjoNcjoVb3gUcPoRdPAReiMVcjkMdPwNdjAIcjsQc38Qc3oV&aag=true&freq=weekly&trk=eml-tod2-b-ttl-3&ut=3KxPl_oj62yR01.

Technologies to Watch in Higher Education: 8 Years’ of Predictions

The New Media Consortium and Educause recently published their annual Horizon Report, which "describes six areas of emerging technology that will have significant impact in higher education within three adoption horizons over the next one to five years" (Johnson, Levine, Smith & Stone, 2010).

In response, I compiled the lists of technologies to watch from the eight Horizon reports that have been published to date:

Year	Time to Adoption: 1 Year or Less	Time to Adoption: 2 to 3 Years	Time to Adoption: 4 to 5 Years
2004	Learning objects Scalable vector graphics (SVG)	Rapid prototyping Multimodal interfaces	Context-aware computing Knowledge webs
2005	Extended Learning Ubiquitous wireless	Intelligent searching Educational gaming	Social Networks & Knowledge Webs Context-Aware Computing/Augmented Reality
2006	Social computing Personal broadcasting	The phones in their pockets Educational gaming	Social networks and knowledge webs Context-aware computing/augmented reality
2007	User-created content Social networking	Mobile phones Virtual worlds	The new scholarship and emerging forms of publication Massively multiplayer educational gaming
2008	Grassroots video Collaboration web	Mobile broadband Data mashups	Collective intelligence Social operating systems
2009	Mobiles Cloud computing	Geo-everything (geo-tagging of data) Personal web	Semantic-aware objects Smart objects
2010	Mobile computing Open content	Electronic books Simple augmented reality	Gesture-based computing Visual data analysis
2011	Electronic books Mobiles (mobile devices)	Augmented reality Game-based learning	Gesture-based computing Learning analytics

Food for thought: Which technologies did they call correctly? Which ones not?

References
Johnson, L., Smith, R., Willis, H., Levine, A., and Haywood, K.,  (2011). The 2011 Horizon Report. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.

Johnson, L., Levine, A., Smith, R., & Stone, S. (2010). The 2010 Horizon Report.

Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.

A Guide to Transferable Credentials--and a Certification Decoder--for Trainers

From Training magazine online:

Thinking about certifying as a training and development professional? You certainly have many choices. U.S.-based professionals can choose among the CPLP, CPT, and CTT and those living in Canada have national certifications.

In addition to spelling out those acronyms, this article identifies the certifications available to training and development professionals. But first, it places certification within the broader scope of external credentials, and describes the role of transferable credentials in attesting to the qualifications of training and development professionals.

Check out the entire article at http://tinyurl.com/4z9tdw7

Check Out My Interview on Digital Life

I discuss technology for education on the Digital Life Show, 2:30 today, with co-host (and former student) Reisa Levine.


Broadcast at 102.3FM Montreal or http://thedigitallifeshow.com.


The podcast remains at the website indefinitely.  

Germany seems poised to limit use of primarily social networking sites, like Facebook, for employment purposes. Although news reports suggest that Facebook believes its privacy settings are sufficient, it seems that the legislators feel otherwise.  


This is not the same thing as a school district in Florida, in which the superintendent unilaterally banned teachers from using Facebook.

That pronouncement only exacerbates confusion over social networking, rather than clarifying confusing points and moving the conversation forward.  In the case of Florida, the issue that seems to have prompted the pronouncement is inappropriate communication between teachers and students.  Banning use of Facebook won't stop inappropriate communication--rather, it avoids the discussion about what is appropriate communication.

The German situation seems different.  It's motivated by a broader concern about what rights employers have when monitoring employees and potential employees, and is part of a bill that has much broader implications than just Facebook.  In addition to social networking, the proposed legislation apparently addresses issues like video monitoring and how employers handle suspected criminal activity.

The proposed legislation distinguishes between social networking sites primarily intended for work-related purposes, like LinkedIn, and those intended primarily for purely social purposes, like Facebook.  Although the news reports I've read do not comment on this, my guess is that the ultimate goal is to avoid situations like those in which bright, 22-year-old university graduates lose good job offers because an employer checked out the candidate's Facebook site, saw a party photo (which is what Facebook was intended for) that ruffled his or her feathers, and rescinded the offer.

Most discussions about the use of Facebook in workplace learning and communication have focused on ways to exploit Facebook for our purposes, without acknowledging the fundamental issue that Facebook was primarily intended for social purposes.

Certainly Facebook hasn't encouraged that acknowledgment, with privacy settings that are only easy to use in theory and, as a result, many users are sharing all of their data whether or not that's their intention.

But it behooves us workplace learning and communication professionals, who are supposed to be sensitive to issues of work-life balance, to recognize that a distinction exists between business and personal social networking sites, and we have a responsibility to launch that discussion.

Although I have a feeling that some social media enthusiasts will not respond enthusiastically to the proposed German legislation, as the lines between work and home life continue to blur, I have a feeling that the discussions of this issue will continue.

For more information about the German legislation, visit http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/business/global/26fbook.html?
    
  

And
The real issue with

Online Universities: "Monsters in the Making" or a Great Place to Study Poker?

A recent article in the Economist suggests that they're the next "boom" about to burst. Their sweet business model--of relying heavily on student loans--is about to sour, as a result of new US regulations intended to address concerns that people who have limited means paying for educations that often do not lead to work in the field or, if it does, results in salaries that are insufficient to pay back the student loan. The tangible evidence of this situation is the high level of defaults of student loans by students in online universities and other private colleges. 

To get a background on this sad situation from the students' perspective, check out Peter S, Goodman's July 18 article, "After Training, Still Scrambling for Employment," at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/business/19training.html?ref=us&pagewanted=all.

To get a sense of the situation from the investor's perspective, check out "Monsters in the Making" from the July 22 issue of the Economist at http://www.economist.com/node/16643333?story_id=16643333.

To get a sense of the proposed regulations, check out Tamar Lewin's report on the regulations proposed at the end of last week at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/23/education/23gainful.html?hpw.

And to get a sense of an alternative--an open source, low-cost online university, check out Anne Kershaw's "Explore alternative subjects at Peer 2 Peer University" published July 12, 2010 in University Affairs: http://www.universityaffairs.ca/peer-2-peer.aspx. One of those courses explores poker.