May 19, 2014 The purchasing process becomes the key that can open the lock-of-possibility for the potential success of the media skills training you provide your workforce! More “live to regret it” decisions are made during that buying process than you can probably imagine. Worse, the wasted money that your company will spend — and, the wasted time your workers will invest in ineffective training initiatives — will do far more harm...
May 14, 2014 “Today was the first day I was ever ashamed to be a teacher. Today I finished administering the sixth day of New York State Common Core assessments. I was a facilitator in a process that made my 10-year-old students struggle, to the point of frustration, to complete yet another 90-minute test. I sat by as I watched my students attempt to answer questions today that were beyond their abilities....
May 12, 2014 What an excellent three days at the ASTD International Conference & Expo last week! Best of all was the “proof” that media training has finally become of worldwide interest. Not too many years ago, the phrase “International Conference” was more a dream than a reality. No longer! Nearly three thousand of the attendees this year were from outside the United States, representing dozens of countries. Media training is becoming...
May 5, 2014 This is the week (May 4-7) of the ASTD International Conference and Exposition. ASTD is expecting nearly 10,000 attendees to gather at the Washington Convention Center. 25% of that number will be international visitors (a remarkable percentage that indicates how global the appeal of training has become). The American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) is the largest training society in the world and hosts the largest collection of...
April 30, 2014 All provided training is not equal in result. All courseware titles are not equal in scope or production design. All trainees do not come to you from a single learning culture. Many studies have proven that traditional “lecture/reading/testing” training programs no longer give the payback in skills acquisition and ROI that they once did. For individuals born after 1960, their learning culture has become grounded in television and/or gaming....
April 28, 2014 “Visual imagery has an important role to play in global entertainment, communication, and education. Images can convey complex concepts in a succinct manner, and visual tools such as video and Web 2.0 and 3.0 technologies can improve understanding and foster peer collaboration. Design and aesthetics have a profound impact on how users perceive information, learn, judge credibility and usability, and ultimately assign value to a product. To dismiss design...
April 23, 2014 Last week, Business Week reported on a new government training initiative: “. . . The first initiative is a $500 million competitive grant program for community colleges that are linked with businesses to teach the specific skills needed for open jobs. The second is a $100 million apprenticeship program, in which businesses, unions, community colleges or non-profit organizations would form partnerships to teach skills for hard-to-fill jobs, such as...
April 21, 2014 “ . . . Funny enough, it seems like most elearning courses can be traced back to PowerPoint in some capacity. Heck, most of them allow you to import PowerPoint. But does using PowerPoint as the base for our learning pigeon-hole us into thinking about learning from a PowerPoint perspective? You know what I mean: Linear. Bullet points. Display mode. Slides. Clipart. It just seems … lacking. This industry...
April 16, 2014 A recent article in “Inside Higher Ed” by Allie Grasgreen gave us some surprising news: “Liberal arts majors may start off slower than others when it comes to their postgraduate career path, but they close much of the salary and unemployment gap over time, a new report shows. (The report, “How Liberal Arts and Sciences Majors Fare in Employment,” includes U.S. Census data from 2010 and 2011 and is...
April 14, 2014 E-Learning has a critical need for Instructional Designers today — designers who understand the unique potential of the medium. Currently, e-Learning is not part of the videotape/videodisc/CD-ROM continuum. No — at the present time, e-Learning courseware creation resides with the technical writers and programmers. And that, unfortunately, gives us the garbage we see today with converted PowerPoint presentations and converted written procedures which results in an on-line experience that...
April 10, 2014 Many years ago, in a speech delivered at ASTD’s 1999 “Interactive Multimedia Conference,” I described some of the negative fallout that has accompanied the then emerging digital networking technologies. I cautioned that, “Today’s learner, all too often, is being left out in the cold. Talking about technology from the learner’s point of view, rather than the digital, seems to be an antiquated discussion packaged away with a box of...
April 7, 2014 Today, I’m going to shift the focus away from formal education and training. Through a single example, I want to describe how technology learning can be made successfully available to “the family,” and can help liberate the adult members from poverty while increasing parent/child involvement in the school setting (the single most important determinant in a child’s educational progression). The success-example with which I am most familiar is the...
April 2, 2014 In the current QUANTA Magazine a segment of a lengthy interview with Freeman Dyson, “A ‘Rebel’ Without a Ph.D” by Thomas Lin, provides an arresting introduction to today’s blog. Dyson, the world-renowned mathematical physicist and now 90, when asked, “You became a professor at Cornell without ever having received a Ph.D. You seem proud of that fact?” “Oh, yes. I’m very proud of not having a Ph.D. I think...
March 31, 2014 Moving training from computer access to tablet and smart phone access is the next big migration in training technology. A couple of years ago, this migration was anticipated and in a blog that appeared in “Tablet Training” a few of the many advantages of this expansion-in-learning were clearly spelled out: Immersion – the way in which a user interacts with a computer based system. Simplicity – the need to...