I love this Sprout application! Momma never told me flash could be this way.

The ASTD Big question this month is What did you learn about learning in 2007? I learn so much all the time from students, clients and colleagues, it is hard to narrow it down to just one or two things, but I'll try. Here are a few of the lessons I have learned. Mostly about the power of the network and Web 2.0 tools. First, I learned how far a digital asset can travel if people find it has value.One of my student's YouTube videos Educational Uses of Second Life has over 5,500 hits and has been favorited 67 times. And a piece I created called Avoiding Death by PowerPoint ...

This month's ASTD Big Question on the Learning Circuit's Blog is about Social Networking and finding help and expertise if you have a question or a concern for which you need input and/or advice. The basic question is " If you need input from people, where's the best place to ask?" But, then the question breaks into sub-questions. -How to reach out and find expertise -How to use Social Media to Find Answers to Questions -How to Learn through Conversation And then the questions are even broken down further into more sub-questions which you can read for yourself at the original ASTD ...

This month's ASTD Big Question relates to a person who graduated from a theory-only program in Instructional Design and was not provided with the experience of actually creating instruction using any of the latest tools. So the question is: What advice would you give to someone who has no experience with e-learning development tools? Where do you start? Particular tools you should explore? Resources you should read? Videos/screencasts you should watch? What would your "To Learn List" look like? Holding myself back, I will calmly answer the question as per Tony's request to ...

This month's ASTD Big Question is, again, a series of questions. Apparently one BIG question is not enough for the learning and development community. We aim to exceed expectations. If you have a to-learn list and are willing to share, and willing to share how you work with that list, that would likely be helpful information. I constantly have a "to-learn" list. Some of the items are necessary and some are "pie-in-the-sky." I tend to have two methods of working on the list. One way is what I call "wandering." Using that technique, I will open up a piece of software or google a ...

To answer the question at ASTD's Learning Circuits Blog , I am going to try to stick to Tony's initial thought of specific questions and dive very deep into the technique I use when consulting for a needs assessment or evaluation. I use a technique I call the 360 Needs Assessment. This process involves asking questions at several levels within an organization. The idea is to separate the facts from the opinions. If I can triangulate information, I know that I have a fact, if I can's substantiate it...well then more investigation is required. Or I know that the information is ...

This month, I worked with Tony Karrer to help create the ASTD Big Question (which always seems to be multiple questions under one big theme.) The main question is Learning design differences for Digital Natives? Of course I have strong opinions on the topic due to the fact that I've written about it many times and I spend all day with digital natives at Bloomsburg University. I'm having trouble deciding if I should rant on this topic or try to build a rational argument so I think this post will be a bit of both. Let me rant first... Yes, yes and yes. We need to ...

The Learning Circuit's Blog question for this month is " ILT and Off-The-Shelf Vendors, What Should they Do ?" I am going to answer that question by recanting a story from Gadgets, Games and Gizmos for Learning . In high school, I literally had a lesson on how to fold a map. The lesson was part of a six week class on how to read and use maps. I vividly remember the lesson because it confounded me how re-folding a simple piece of paper could be so darn frustrating. I always had the last flap inside out. Instead of the nice map cover, I had an obscure piece of Pennsylvania highway on the ...

Anyone going to the ASTD Conference in San Diego in June? It's nice to get together at conferences . If you are going - please drop a comment below. Even better if you might be interested in blogging about sessions, thoughts, notes, etc. from your experience at the conference. I won't even say it's Mandatory Blogging. :) Likely this is a better way to have success with networking ahead of the conference ( Social Conference Tools - Expect Poor Results ). ASTD's site ... doing an eLearning 2.0 Presentation at the ASTD Conference.

Lance Dublin mentioned a couple of handouts today from sessions I was not able to attend. It took me a little while to find this link to the ASTD 2008 Session Handouts. My session (yesterday) can be found: M313 - E-Learning 2.0 for Personal and Group Learning (PDF).

Sunday I hop on a plane for Denver, the locus of ASTD's TechKnowledge conference. In the past, this was generally an introductory conference, with lots of very basic material. It was perfect for newbies. This year's TechKnowledge looks to be more sophisticated. Elliott Masie delivers one keynote, Ray Kurzweil the other. If you read Internet Time Blog , you already know I'm a tremendous fan of Ray's work. His notion of the acceleration of time is enough to rattle any of our cages. The radical changes we will experience in the next decade underpin my plea that organizations adopt ...

ASTD TechKnowledge 2009 is coming to Las Vegas in January. I'm doing two sessions including a keynote / general session - descriptions below. If you are planning to go to the conference and read this, please drop me a comment because Get Together at Conferences - F2F Still Matters . Better yet, go take a look at: Be an Insanely Great Professional Conference Attendee Better Questions for Learning Professionals Continuing Thoughts on Questions What Questions Should We be Asking? Session Hopping a Practical Guide General Session - New Work Literacies and E-Learning ...

I just received a question that I'm sure often is on the minds of people in eLearning - which conference they should attend (eLearning Guild DevLearn or ASTD TechKnowledge). I'm hoping that everyone can weigh in on their thoughts. Here's was the specific question (and all the information I have to go on) to help advise this person - I have been trying to decide whether to attend DevLearn 2008 or ASTD TechKnowledge in 2009. I have never attended either. I have been designing and developing elearning for about a year. Any suggestions? This person works in health care in ...

Here are the slides for the ASTD TechKnowledge Presentation . It was an all day workshop and we spent most of the time in Second Life but you may find the slides helpful. For the ASTD Conference, we talked about a couple of books used for Second Life. Here are the links: Other resources: SL Portal LSL Wiki Here is a post to additional links: Second Life Resourses: Supporting NCTT Opening Address __ Catalog of Recommended Books, Games and Gadgets Recommended Games and Gadgets Recommended Books Content ...

TechKnowledge Wiki wiki wiki ASTD TechKnowledge ASTD TechKnowledge If you are going please... Upcoming ... presenting at ASTD TechKnowledge in Las Vegas as compared to the eLearningGuild's Annual Conference in Boston. Still, it ...

I'm at the ASTD Conference in San Diego at the general session. It looks like there are about 5,000 people in the room. A complete guess at the number, but pretty good size. Tony Bingham, ASTD CEO, is talking about and showing videos around talent management. It's interesting to see the message be around talent management when often that's fairly separate from the learning function. My experience is that talent management is more focused on performance review, succession planning, recruitment, retention, and other HR processes - less on specific learning / development. I've got to ...

There are a number of groups and societies available for those people who are interested in eLearning. Among these are: ASTD (American Society for Training & Development) eLearning Guild ISPI (International Society for Performance Improvement) SALT ( Society for Applied Learning Technology ) STC (Society for Technical Communication) Please click the desired link above for more information.

I'm heading out to ASTD in Atlanta tomorrow after I do a keynote tomorrow morning here in Los Angeles for the ASTD eLearning Bootcamp. I hope if you read this and you are going to either one, you will introduce yourself.

ASTD TechKnowledge 2008 San Antonio is over. After having had a little time to think and reflect, here’s my overall review of the event. I don’t know if the crummy facilities last year (the dusty, smelly, doomed Riviera ... better, the frequent meals provided by ASTD were a nice bonus, and the sessions seemed better organized and of higher ... . Well done, ASTD. The sessions were, as they always are at events like these, hit or miss, but I generally enjoyed ... us to teach ourselves? Note (plea) to ASTD: if presenters plan to include significant group breakout activities ...

Yesterday, Tony O'Driscoll , Matthew Monahan and I gave an ASTD Webinar on the topic of Second Life. We talked about it a little and gave a tour. One of the attendees was Tom Werner who wrote a nice post about his participation in the webinar called Simple vs Complex Spaces . Tom has written a great deal on Second Life and innovative learning content and methods. If you haven't already, you should check out his blog...lot of great links and posts to good information. Our session yesterday was very interesting. We had most of the 400 plus people attending via application sharing ...

Next up at ASTD - Malcolm Gladwell - new book in November - Outliers - how people get to be successful. Talks about two kinds of creative styles: Experimental innovator - never has a big bold idea, works slowly, trial-and-error, empirical, approach master Conceptual innovator - big idea, can execute it themselves He draws this distinction in artists, writers and the point is that it applies to any kind of field. We have a tendency to value the conceptual innovator more than the experimental innovator. He spends about 10 minutes to show this through discussion of Fleetwood Mac ...

Here is a reminder for you ASTD Members. February's Featured T+D Webcast: Rapid Learning Join ASTD tomorrow at 2:00 PM ET for this month's featured T+D Webcast, which examines how the need to deliver training materials faster is altering design and delivery of training programs. Karl Kapp, a faculty member at Bloomsburg University, and Allison Rossett, professor of educational technology at San Diego State University, will also discuss the design challenges of ... EST Note: Please do not log in until 1:30 p.m. EST (I'll be rehearsing) Webcast registration is free for ASTD ...

ASTD's Ryann Ellis has organized the first batch of SimWords in this here Glossary . Enjoy!

I'm at the opening session at ASTD TechKnowledge ( http://tk07.astd.org ). I'll soon be doing a session on Blogging and Social Bookmarking for Personal and Group Learning. Tony Bingham, President of ASTD, is doing his introduction, and his content is: Web 2.0, personal learning, easy distribution of software (software as a service), video is here now, push to pull, teaching Gen Y (what he calls the netGeneration). What a great setup for my presentation. Thanks Tony. And, it's somewhat surprising to see a relatively slow moving organization, ASTD, driving this discussion. One thing ...

This morning, hundreds of us packed the ballroom of the new Hyatt Regency Colorado Convention Center for the opening of TechKnowledge 06. Incoming ASTD president Kevin Oakes thanked the Rocky Mountain Chapter, advisory boards, hard-working staff, platinum sponsors, silver sponsors, planning committees, and others. Kevin and I go back quite a ways; Oakes Interactive was hawking multimedia training before the Web was invented. If I'm not mistaken, Kevin is the first educational technolgy specialist to lead ASTD. Elliott Masie took the stage to encourage us to adopt Extreme ...

ASTD TechKnowledge 2008 is coming soon in San Antonio. Now that it's less than a month away, I thought I'd sit down and try to do some conference planning. To help me prepare, I went back to a few previous posts on related topics... In looking back, I first found a lot of posts that really suggested the key was having a good set of questions to provide a lens onto the conference: Be an Insanely Great Professional Conference Attendee Conference Preparation Better ... make contact. It somewhat presupposes you have a purpose. It also supposes you can get into and use ASTD CONNECT ...

Frank Nguyen is presenting at ASTD on EPSS. You can find his presentation on his site. His major points were: Search is not an effective method for performers to find information. Integrating information closer to the work flow and work interface can improve performance. Novices cannot effectively use the same support systems as experts. Providing learners with more on-the-job performance support does not eliminate the need for training and there are cases where training is preferred When in learning mode - people want minimal information. When in performance mode - they want ...

I'm on the flight back from ASTD TechKnowledge and thought I should try to capture some initial thoughts from the conference and sessions while it was still fresh and before life clouds my memory... I did two sessions and face time at the conference. I also had some really good lunch conversations. I found that one-on-one and small group is a fantastic way to have meaningful discussions. It's too bad that there aren't ways to do more of this at a conference ... That was a big challenge. I'm going to do a similar presentation in June at ASTD ICE in San Diego .

Continuing what has now become somewhat a tradition (see Beer Tasting at ASTD TechKnowledge , and Boston, Beer - Bloggers - Learn.com ), I plan to informally get together with bloggers at the ASTD conference in Atlanta in June to go have a few beers. I just realized that's less than a month away. We'll do it on June 4th in the evening. If you are planning to go to ASTD and you have a blog, drop me a comment. Or if you needed that extra little incentive to start a blog right now, this may be the trick.

I'm trying Slideshare for the first time. I've embedded the presentation from last week that I mentioned before . SlideShare Link A few posts that go along with the content: Delicious Upgrade Have Work and Learning Changed or the Way We Do Work and Learning? Learning and Networking with a Blog (Deleted Scenes) What is eLearning 2.0? eLearning 1.0, 1.3 and 2.0 Learning Trends Point To and Shape eLearning 2.0 Web 2.0 and eLearning 2.0 Start-Up Guides Personal and Group Learning Using Web 2.0 Tools Authoring in eLearning 2.0 / Add-ins & Mash-ups ...