Mark over at Learning Conversations has an interesting map of organizational learning.  Looks complete except for two things:  learning from professional associations and self-learning.

The buzz is that Grockit (a GMAT prep company) is creating what they call a “massive multiplayer online learning” product.  They are not releasing any details but once can guess the general outlines from various research reports:

1)  Leadership in a Distributed World 

2)   Virtual Worlds, Real Leaders

3)  You Play World of Warcraft?  You’re Hired! 

4)  Gaming  Advances as a Learning Tool

5)  Online Games for 21st Century Skills (opens as a PDF)

I just sat through a 256-slides PowerPoint with at least three bullets of dense text to each slide.  And this from a PhD and generally good speaker.  It’s a poor musician who blames their instrument.

How to use PowerPoint to enhance the presentation:  TED’s Presentation Innovation

Next month, I will teach a two-week unit on urban politics using SimCity 4 and City Life.  I am looking forward to this but I have to admit that it has been a little difficult to tailor the city planning aspects of the programs in highlighting issues of urban politics.  City Life has been easier to work with considering that it does have the social aspect of six distinct groups.  I have heard that Tilted Mill Entertainment is planning to release SimCity Societies which will also have some social aspects when designing neighborhoods.

Golden Swamp argues that the future of learning will be mobile and embedded in social networks. I can agree with that because, after seeing the proliferation of Blackberries, it’s easy to imagine more powerful devices making their way into the classes. Actually, I think the classroom as a physical space will be replaced by ad-hoc personal learning spaces. Imagine the future university when there are no more set times and locations for a class.

Great posting in Change Agency about the lack of Web 2.0 literacy skills among students. This is a common problem for me when I talk to students about how to use online research resources responsibly and, most important, clean-up their online behavior. I’ve helped several students “remodel” their FaceBook or MySpace sites before they start the job hunt. I’m preparing a lecture on how to project a professional online presence which I will post here when I am finished with the research.

Did some name badge stuffing and rolled-up posters.  Will blog more when I get to attend the sessions.

One of the issues I deal with is teaching students to separate the Internet junk from the valuable information. In this case study, Lisa Foggo describes how she used blogs to educate students on how to evaluate Internet information. Good example.

Great collection of links for mindmapping.  Here is tip 100 to round out the list:

Use MindMaps as a visual representation of your lecture.  I have done that several times and it is a great way to engage the visual and auditory learners.  Now, have the students create their own maps and you have engaged the kinesthetic learners.  What is really effective is to link specific topic mind maps to a larger summary mind map and publish this out as a webpage.  Great way to represent the forest and the trees of your class.