Brent Uncategorized social media/tech

The Work Literacy course ran from September 29 through November 7, 2008. Although new activities are no longer being added, the community and course content will remain online and we invite new participants to join in and explore the topics below.

Week 1- Social Networking–Ning, LinkedIn and Facebook
Week 2–Social Bookmarking and Tagging
Week 3– Blogs
Week 4–Aggregators and RSS Feeds
Week 5–Wikis
Week 6–Pulling it all Together

Below is a post I made on the subject of reflective practitioner.

Week 3: Blogging for Personal Learning – Work Literacy

“Don’t tell me you don’t have time or that other things are more important. Is anything in your work life more important than continuing to be better at what you do? Because that’s what reflection is about–considering what you can learn from your experiences and then doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t”.

“After reading the blog post from Michele (quote above) on Becoming a More Reflective Practitioner I was motivated to write. Her comments really address my own inertia and the inertia I see in others when I’m promoting the use of blogs and social tech/media for learning, working and professional development.

I’m an active blogger for personal learning over the past 5 years and I use blogs in my projects over that time period. I’m a dyed in the wool blog evangelist however I’m not the best at adopting a more rigorous approach to my reflective practice. I think that at times I am stuck in the shiny toy syndrome where I become enamoured with the latest social media tool. I get distracted in my reflection time by my interest in consuming new ideas and concepts that others are writing about.

Michele’s post especially resonated with me today as I’m facilitating a workshop tomorrow titled “Thinking Critically to Improve Programming”. It’s a series of workshops coupled with online learning via our blog that tries to help youth work practitioners be better at what they do – working with youth experiencing poverty and homelessness. I’ll be adding some of the resources that Michele used in her post to the mix of activities in my workshop.

Like Charlie Bluglass who commented earlier, I’m introducing social media to the youth service community in my Region and really enjoy the challenge of showing how these tools can increase impact and engagement outcomes. By following Charlie’s post, I found the larger Youth Work Online ning site which was very inspiring for me as I plan on doing a similar initiative as my project winds down over the coming months.

In closing, I am leaving my highest recommendation for a book that taught me a lot about learning and reflective practice. It’s called “crucial conversations – Tools for talking when stakes are high’.
There are many books out there that help me learn, particularly with social media but for me, this one tops them all. It is about communication between people and the bonding that can occur when crucial conversations happen. I believe these crucial conversations happen within the blogging community, creating unique learning experiences for a wide variety of writers and readers. So this exercise has got me to reflect about how I’m blogging and how I can be a better blogger by taking time to reflect about my important conversations and experiences. I’ll be working on these practices in the coming weeks, months and years.

Brent Uncategorized course, eliteracy, onlinelearning, social media/tech

Stephen Downes has so many great slide shows and speeches. This one looks very fascinating, particularly in respect to his references to complexity and chaos theory.

Brent Uncategorized social media/tech

What a sweet little story that explains the new reality of marketing. It’s all over baby blue…

Brent Uncategorized conversation, social media/tech, socialmedia

An interesting post from Janet Clarey a Brandon Hall Research Blog. Up until now I didn’t know that there wasn’t any significant difference between on line learning and face to face learning. I’m far away from designing on line learning courses however my Streetjibe blog is designed to foster learning amongst youth work practitioners so this post is quite interesting for me. Her post is a response from Daniel Lemire who wrote a recent post, some myths about online teaching, based on his experiences in higher ed.

My mythical experiences with online learning in corporate education include:

• Myth: It takes less time to create an online course than a face-to-face course.Some courses I was involved in creating lasted longer than labor and delivery (and all I got was a lousy t-shirt). But wait! That’s because they needed to be. They were highly interactive with branching, audio, video, etc. And they were long. A different learning intervention might require less production. IT DEPENDS.
  However, if you want some facts and figures, Bryan Chapman’s post, how long does it take to create learning provides some comparison ratios between ILT and various levels of e-learning that you will find helpful.

• Myth: You can “repurpose” [definition: to use or convert for use in another format or product] a face-to-face course and put it online. (look, the book is now on CD!)This, to me, is copy-and-paste e-learning. I can go to Amazon.com and order a book and read it. Or I can order a recorded book and have someone read it to me. It’s not learning. Reading the “script” of an ILT course is not online learning. However, creating a learning environment where people can discuss, rate, do additional research, etc. based the book….well, not so crazy.)

• Myth: Online learning costs less than face-to-face training. This got me thinking about Tom Kuhlmann’s excellent (as always) post several weeks ago, here’s why rapid e-learning is so darn cool, about empowering subject matter experts (SMEs). (Tom writes for Articulate, an e-learning authoring tool that can be used to create rapid e-learning).In Tom’s post and in the comments (in addition to my ‘who you callin’ a pundit?’ comment) there was some discussion of the cost of “custom content” created by an outside source (i.e., the “evil” vendor bwah-ha-ha-ha!). I shot off an email to my colleague Tom Werner, director of the Brandon Hall Research Excellence in Learning Awards, because I thought he could quickly get his hands on some numbers related to past custom e-learning entries (of which some are not expensive-to-produce-type e-learning courses that are often the subject of criticism). Tom gave me some figures and some variables to consider. (variables = the asterisk that is the common denominator of instructional design for online learning.)Some of Tom’s considerations relative to cost:
• whether the raw content itself is already available.
• the number of hours in the course.
• the level of interactivity.
• the type of media in the course (especially if video, games, or virtual environments are used).
• the size of the audience that the cost is spread over In the corporate environment.

Some Figures:

• On the high end, one of the gold award winner’s course cost $90K
• Customer Content Developers in our Custom Content KnowledgeBase report these averages for a hour of finished content (n = 110)
  • Level 1 Interactivity (content with interactive test questions): average $15,067
  • Level 2 Interactivity (content with at least 20% very interactive learning activities): average $24,672
  • Level 3 Interactivity (simulation-based content): average $41,138
• Myth: Online learning = course / class. This suggests that all learning is ‘formal,’ something that is scheduled with a start/stop time. Online learning is so much more.
• Myth: You can teach anything online. Maybe you “can” (are able) but that doesn’t mean you should. Learning is not about the delivery channel.
• Myth: Face-to-face instruction is more effective than online learning. Actually, the research says there is no significant difference.

What myths have you encountered?

Technorati Tags: onlinelearning, research

Brent Uncategorized social media/tech

This software is my favourite tool for story telling. It will be very useful for many of my projects. Here is an example of the tool and how it is used in the classroom.
I am figuring out the pasting of this code… I will have it eventually…..

Brent Uncategorized social media/tech, storytelling voices