Just poking around Google’s Knols:

1)  E-Learning

2) Cognition, Affect, and Learning

3) Online Learning

Great article in Work Literacy blog about professors who grew up in a print-and-text world having difficulty teaching in a multimedia-and-visual world.  I see this often as I watch professors read text-heavy PowerPoints to their classes.  They believe content can only be found in the textbooks and their lecture notes (often the very PowerPoint slides they project) and that anything online is just secondary to the “real content.”   The students see knowledge as being distributed in small pieces that are connected to each in a network while the professors often see knowledge as being centralized in central storage places such as the library.

I am not arguing that one is better than the other but that we should learn to adopt to both perspectives and be able to switch when it is suitable.  For example, creating a class wiki is an excellent way for students to explore a subject but we should also assign relevant books that can provide deeper understanding of topic.  We should expand our definitions of literacy to encompass both the linear and non-linear ways of thinking.

I’m currently reading Nancy Duarte’s slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations and it is a great book on designing PowerPoint presentations.  I like it even better than Cliff Atkinson’s book (although both complement each other well).  Duarte’s ideas apply very well to building effective lectures and training sessions especially the section on how to present data for emphasis.

I have just received some initial responses on my new PowerPoint lectures designed for online courses and the students really seem to love the mixture of graphics and audio.  With Duarte’s ideas, I can create even better online lectures that should decrease barriers to knowledge transfer.  Looking forward to redoing my other lectures and training presentations.

I was busy last week putting together an online class in HTML development.  Using the Quality Matters rubric, I redesigned all of my assignments, recorded PowerPoint lectures, and created an extensive series of discussion forums.  I built all of this in Blackboard instead of Moodle because I want to remain platform agnostic and to force myself to really learn all of Blackboard’s features.

Two new features (at least to Blackboard) will be a wikis component and a blog component. I am preparing a training class on these two tools and I have to say that I like the tools.  What I think many educators will find useful is the user tracking built into the wiki.  Having an easy and an effective way to assess user contributions to the wiki will be quite attractive to teachers.

The latest issue of T+D has an article claiming that training is broken because it doesn’t deliver results as promised.  There is a kernel of truth in the article but the case is overstated.  There is nothing wrong with modern training methods that use active learning and collaborative tools to deliver the content.  But what is causing the failure of training is the support of the company after the training.  The authors argue for performance systems that deliver “just-in-time” training as a solution.

That is a good idea but again, I see the need for follow-through management which was championed in Wick, Pollock, Jefferson, and Flanagan’s Six Disciplines of Breakthrough Learning. I believe this will fix whatever ails training.

Had lunch with a colleague who just came back from the Campus Technology conference in Boston. Sounded like a great time and there are just wonderful things happening in educational technology. But, everything still seems to be either a variation on blogs, wikis, Moodle, or Second Life. Where are the really new groundbreaking tools?

I built Research Based Training because I mistakenly thought Evidence Based Training was taken.  But it is not and now the Evidence Based Training Ning Network is up and running at http://ebtraining.ning.com/.  See you there!

It started with Kruse’s article on the need for evidence-based training and continued with Ruark’s article in T+D.  Then, I read Christensen’s Disrupting Class in which he details in Chapter 7 the need for better education research.  After I read Clark and Mayer’s e-Learning and the Science of Instruction: Proven Guidelines for Consumers and Designers of Multimedia Learning, I was inspired to create an online network to begin the movement for evidence-based training.  So, like most people, I went to Ning.com and created a social network - Research Based Training.  Please join the conversation.  And if you are building your own network and resources for evidence-based training, please tell me so we can link to you.