The Work-Based Learning Unit of e-Skills UK has published preliminary results from their research with employers and learners in the UK "to help understand why employers are currently investing in e-learning and the difference it is making to their business and staff." Some 209 organisations were surveyed (173 producing usable data) and 650 learners. You can download the results from the site, but I thought I'd draw out a few findings which caught my attention: Blending ... materials, 36% engaged in online communities and discussion groups. The research also makes some interesting ...

Jay Cross got me straight on fraudulent information concerning the effectiveness of learning methods. Will Thalheimer who has a great blog with research-based commentary on learning and performance got some mails out on this topic and ... those mails surely got me gasping for air. In a previous presentation I have mentioned William Glasser and I put in statistics that I thought he used to divide learning methods. Some of those circulating statistics turn out to be myths linked to professional names like Glasser and others. The first post in which ...

Back when I first started getting into the field, I remember reading some articles and publications from Kurt Squire and James Paul Gee who were tied in to some of the research that MIT was doing on games for learning. MIT has come out with some more good research. Specifically, in 2005, the MacArthur Foundation at MIT undertook a new grant-based initiative. They recently released the results of the two-year effort. Here is the link for the series of interdisciplinary studies in the field of digital media and learning. There is a lot of good information in these six books.

In the last post, HDL cholesterol levels appear to have a positive effect on memory recall (or at least arrest its decline). On a similar dietary theme: Scientists Find Blueberries Reverse Age Related Memory Deficits Researchers (from the Schools of Food Biosciences and Psychology in Reading and the Institute of Biomedical and Clinical Sciences at the Peninsula Medical School in Exeter) ...

I've previously posted on the effect of sleep on our learning and memory effectiveness in Snooze and Learn Faster and Six minute nap may boost memory. Here's yet another study supporting the need for sleep to consolidate a new experience. To sleep, perchance to remember (Nice title, not mine but a similar Shakespearian steal as Learning As You Like It) Neuroscientists at Geneva ...

An article called Experimental Subjects in the Economist of June 2nd caught my eye. The sub-title read Neuroscience can transform education-if scientists talk to teachers . It seems that in their impatience for practical guidelines to arise from neuroscience research, teachers are turning increasingly to vendors offering them 'brain-based learning' packages containing what Usha Goswami refers to as 'alarming amounts of misinformation'. Apparently teachers receive up to 70 mailshots a year encouraging them to attend courses on brain-based learning. So what sort of 'neuromyths' are ...

... of age take more advantage of it. Some third-party research is quoted in the report: Some 77% of Inc ...

Over the past month I've managed to collect an interesting range of research snippets relating to memory and cognition. There's definitely a sense of acceleration of activity in this area, which unfortunately also brings with it its own hype and hysterical headlines. Over the next few posts I'll summarise the ones that most caught my eye: Cholesterol and Memory People with high levels ...

The Annual Survey Report for 2008 on Learning and Development from the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development (CIPD) presents a confusing picture on the status of e-learning in the UK. The CIPD sent surveys to 5000 of their members who have the role of l&d manager and received 729 responses. Of these, half were private sector and half public/voluntary. 55% worked for organisations with less than 1000 employees, while only 20% represented organisations with more than 5000 employees. CIPD is the leading HR professional body in the UK, with 130,000 members. It would be fair to ...

Harold Wilson once famously remarked that 'a week is a long time in politics'. Well, for that remark to make sense you have to be able to compare it with something - how about 'ten years is no time at all in learning and development'. I enjoyed Daniel Wain and Graham O'Connell's session, Ten Years of Changing Trends in Learning and Development at the CIPD's HRD 2008 show in London this week, mainly because both presenters were honest enough to admit that not much had changed at all. Now we have to put this in perspective, in that the session was an analysis of ten years of CIPD surveys, ...

There are quite a few interesting surprises in the eLearning Guild's Snapshot Report on Learning Modalities released yesterday. The report looks at the take-up of various forms of e-learning as reported by an ongoing survey of Guild members, the majority of whom are located in the USA. Traditional e-learning Asynchronous (self-paced) e-learning is used sometimes or often in 83% of organisations, but more so in bigger organisations. Synchronous (live) e-learning is used sometimes or often in 63% of organisations, and again more so in bigger organisations and more in the US than ...

Ofcom's latest Communications Market Report provides a fascinating insight into the dramatic changes taking place in the way UK citizens are using information and communication technology (the emphasis is mine): Children "Fewer children are playing console and computer games (61% regularly did so in 2005 down to 53% in 2007), watching videos and DVDs (59% did so regularly in 2005 and 38% in 2007) and listening to radio (40% listened regularly in 2005 and 20% in 2007). Instead, they are using their mobile phones more often (50% regularly did so in 2005 compared with 53% in 2007), ...

A posting by George Siemens alerted me to the startling prediction that the e-Learning Market to hit $56 billion by 2010 . Now, call me an old cynic, but even when the forecast comes from the impressively titled Global Industry Analysts (whoever they are), I cannot summon up the remotest excitement. I have never known a single e-learning industry forecast to be anywhere near accurate and I can only assume that these figures are produced for someone other than me, e.g. (1) those starting a new business in this field and looking to impress the bank/investors, (2) those wishing to justify a ...

In Blood Flow and Learning , Michelle Gallen claims that: "When you sit down for more than 20 minutes your blood pools in your behind and feet?If you get up and move around your blood recirculates, and inside a minute, your brain gets a hit of about 15% more blood. This helps you think." Presumably that means that if you have a big behind or big feet then you're in even bigger trouble. Now neither of these are my problem (as if you really wanted to know), but this is still an interesting notion. It's long been claimed that, in a classroom session, you should change what the group has to do ...

There's more fuel to the informal learning fire from a survey of 2076 employees in the UK conducted by the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE). They asked employees to identify the activities that had been useful in helping them to do their job better. Here's what came back. The figures show those who found the activity 'very or quite helpful', with those who found the activity 'of some help' shown in parentheses: Doing your job on a regular basis 82% (13%) Being shown by others how to do certain activities or tasks 62% (23%) Watching and listening to others while ...

A survey by Cegos Group , reported in this month's issue of e.learning age magazine, finds that companies in the UK are leading the way in Europe by providing training to some 61% of their staff. In France, Germany and Italy, less than half has any training. Consider also that more companies in the UK are benefiting from technology-driven training programmes than their EC counterparts. To quote the article: "While the UK is training more people, it is running shorter programmes and spending less on professional development than its European counterparts. Tight funding and the ...

A new survey from the UK Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) asks how organisations are responding to Gen Y employees and Web 2.0 technologies. According to the report, "both CIPD members and London Business School alumni in senior positions were contacted by email to complete the online survey. A total of 488 responses were received, of which over half worked in private services, 20% worked in public services, 18% worked in manufacturing and production, and 6% worked in voluntary, community and not-for-profit organisations." Unfortunately, you have to be a ...

Abstract : "People are seeking more meaningful and customized information than what is obtained by keywords-based queries and document retrieval through a search engine. In this paper, we look at a set of such services, referred to as social Q&A sites. With sites such as Google Answers, and primarily Yahoo! Answers, we attempt to understand various characteristics of user participation and their possible effects on the design and success of the site. We discuss these social Q&A sites by comparing their designs based on user participation and point out the effects and defects of each.

It was exciting to see Guild research as part of an article in Business Week . From the Story "...fledgling corporate games and virtual worlds are not nearly as sophisticated or visually stunning as some of the most popular consumer games involving millions of players, such as World of Warcraft, but they are precursors of what's in the pipeline. In a recent survey of nearly 1,500 people in large and small companies, the eLearning Guildâ€"a group investigating the design and management of e-learning tools for business, government, and educationâ€"found that the number of people ...

We really do live in exciting times. What with global geopolitical and economic power shifts and increasingly evident environmental concerns it's easy to feel uneasy. Yet there are plenty of reasons to remain optimistic about our ability to learn new ways to manage and cope through what will inevitably be a long rollercoaster ride over the next few decades. The pace of innovation in many ...

... scientific research. Specifically, he looks at the research potential that Second Life and World of Warcraft have in the ... for research: Second Life is especially well designed to mount formal experiments in social psychology or cognitive science, because the researcher can construct a facility comparable to a real-world laboratory and recruit research ... values. Compared to the real world, virtual worlds have the potential to recruit thousands of research participants (when I struggled to get 100) with diverse backgrounds in order to conduct research s panning longer time ...

Too many people have been talking about learning styles research lately for me to try to cite them all here. Many ... found two lengthy reviews of learning styles research: Learning styles and pedagogy in post-16 learning Should we be using learning styles? What research has to say to practice These are two related reports with some shared content. The first is a literature review of 13 often-cited learning styles; the second summarizes that research and ... learning styles research is weak, failing on external reviews of consistency, reliability, and validity. Some models are ...

Continuing the theme from the previous post, there are some good resources resources for educators and researchers interested in using virtual worlds in their disciplines. Linden Labs actually provides a great deal of the resources for Education and Non-Profit Organizations . SimTeach uses a wiki to establish a community for sharing information in virtual worlds. They also include a list of universities who are using SL and a list of guidelines for educators in SL.

... the fact that there is now research showing that computers can use an algorithm to do almost human-like pattern matching and recognition or that the entirety of this article is available for free online. (by the way, side topic, I will NEVER by another computer with anything less than 4GBs of RAM - oh, and Comcast, in case you're doing more illegal packet sniffing, you suck). This article from ZDNet lays out what I think is huge about this; namely that the algorithm presents: "a computational model that learns structures of many different forms and that discovers which ...

At a panel at DevLearn. We have: Will Thalheimer, Work Learning Research Kevin Oakes, I4CP Claire Schooley, Forrester Chris Howard, Bersin Kevin Martin, Aberdeen Biggest trend is Learning 2.0 trend. Allow people to work faster, better through informal learning. eLearning 2.0 addresses informal, on-the-job. It's relatively new. Bersin is ... ASTD research - 86% - web 2.0 technologies likely to use more in learning function than they do today 41% - using ... handle control of their own learning? What does research show? Some debate, but no research on this yet. Somewhat ...

Through my research into Wiki implementations in corporate settings I have found that there is just not a lot of info out there. I am having a hard time finding good and bad examples of Wiki implementations and how they are best used in corporate settings. I have found a few blog posts regarding Wikis in corporate settings but overall I am going at this blind. I am assuming this is because Wikis are not being used in many corporate settings at this point and there are not many people with this type of experience. Once I have the Wiki off and running I will begin working on a case ...

... physicians or researchers in the field a more autonomic way of giving data feedback to us and our South partners. Taken ... research areas because the survey developer has a certain amount of autonomy that enables her or him to design the survey up to the real research or educational needs. I have chosen to install the software on my desktop first and then (using ... you quickly want to analyse the results of the survey or if you like this to connect to your research). You can add ... of ITM's top veterinary researchers Maxime Madder gives his okay, we will be test driving this in South-Africa ...

The BBC reports on the New Scientist reporting on a German study finding (here's the source article) that: Just six minutes "shut-eye" for volunteers was followed by significantly better recall of words. "Ultra-short" sleep could launch memory processing in the brain, suggested the researchers from the University of Dusseldorf. This follows on from my earlier post Snooze and Learn Faster.

I recently received a copy, through the Association for Learning Technology (ALT), of a fascinating publication sponsored by JISC called In their own words . The publication synthesises the outcomes of Phase 1 of JISC's Learner experiences of e-Learning studies, which set out to examine the phenomenon of e-learning from the perspective of the learners themselves. The research was carried out in the UK amongst those involved in further and higher education, as well as work-based learning. I'd like to share some of the conclusions: " Learning in a digital age : ...

Recently I've been reading Eric Jensen's book Brain-Based Learning , and this took me to some work done by Dr Emile Donchin at the University of Illinois in 1986. Apparently, Donchin and his associates conducted some research which appeared to show that more than 99% of our learning is nonconscious. Jensen was interested in the implication for teachers: "Most of what's learned in your class is not in your lesson plan; in other words, there's a documented, enormous and profound differential between teaching and learning." On the Teaching Expertise site , they make a similar ...