SharePoint Fear and Loathing by Learning Professionals

I was surprised by the fear and loathing expressed around SharePoint yesterday at LearnTrends 2009.  I don’t think it’s the best tool out there, but it likely is the best tool being adopted by your IT department and is part of the Enterprise 2.0 plan in your organization.  My belief is that it’s going to be a big part of eLearning 2.0 for many workplace learning professionals.  SharePoint 2010 looks to be a much better product.

As such, I’m always looking for people who want to discuss how they are using it.  Certainly we’ll be doing more sessions like SharePoint in Corporate Learning - Free Micro Virtual Conference (see SharePoint Session Descriptions).  And I’ll continue to collect examples of how organizations are Using SharePoint.

In fact, towards that end, I would appreciate you connecting with me (email, LinkedIn) if:

• You work in an organization that is using SharePoint and might be interested in sharing how you are using it.
• You are a consultant who works on SharePoint workplace learning implementations.
• You are interested in how SharePoint can better be used in your organization.

Look forward to connecting with you.

LearnTrends Innovation Award Winners 2009

We’ve just announced the innovation awards associated with LearnTrends 2009. The session was fraught with technical difficulties, so I thought it would be worth capturing a bit about each of the four award winners here.

CUDA Business Brain

CUDA technologies is a small software firm within the Hi Performance Learning and IQ Business Group in South Africa, the United Stated and Australia.

In 2007, they launched the CUDA Business Brain as an integrated Workplace Performance Support Solution. It provides a blend of learning management and performance support. Because they operate in bandwidth constrained locations, they have implemented an extremely light web interface. They provide automated content distribution capability. A unique a Visio enabled process publishing tool that 'walks' users through performance support when they need it. This combination, backed by flexible expert location, rating and ranking mechanisms, makes our offering stand apart in providing cutting edge performance support and learning management to large audiences.

Learnosity

Learnosity provide a set of tools to help in the assessment, teaching and learning of spoken language skills. The Learnosity system is designed for speaking, listening and learning via a mobile phone.

The use of the mobile phone allows students practice their spoken skills in and outside of the classroom, facilitating student-led learning. The use of such simple technology eliminates any required technical support in the classroom, and make the system extremely easy to use for both teachers and students. Voice-chat and text-chat facilitate structured, moderated and anonymous peer-to-peer learning.

Thinking Worlds

Thinking Worlds is a new kind of 3D “Serious Games” simulation engine and authoring tool. It provides an authoring interface that fuses a visual story boarding system with easy to follow templates, both of which require no programming skill at all. It makes it possible to develop rich simulations in a fast and cost-effective way. It publishes simulations that are both LMS and SCORM compliant. Playback is through standard technologies allowing easier distribution.

CLT Plug and Learn

CLT Plug&Learn is an interesting blended language learning course combining learning software with extensive online tutoring and regular (virtual) classroom training, framed by a placement test, a Kick-Off meeting and a final test. Based on the results of the placement test, students are offered a language course designed to meet their goals. During the self-study phase, they practice their written, reading, listening, comprehension and pronunciation skills with the language software. A tutoring team assists students via e-mail. They receive a weekly e-mail with their assignment, additional written production exercises, motivational and technical tips as well as personalized feedback based on the self-study results as recorded in the LMS.

Congratulations to the winners.

Be Ready to Take Advantage of Opportunities

I participated in a session at DevLearn that I mentioned last week in my posts Missed Opportunities and Enough Tools for Now. The session was conducted where we broken into discussion groups around different topics each their own facilitator.

My group discussed that as learning professionals we need to put ourselves in position to be able to serve learners and internal/external clients through the best possible solution we can design and create given the constraints that exist. This might mean improving our capabilities around existing offerings. It also means getting ready to offer new kinds of solutions that are outside of what we currently deliver.

The challenge in this is:

• There’s a very wide range of possible issues that we can be presented. It’s often hard to know ahead of time what your next request will be.
• If we haven’t spent time and effort to be ready to offer a particular kind of solution, it’s harder to sell, harder to estimate, and has greater risk.
• We have limited time and resources to spend trying new things out and putting ourselves in position to deliver them when needed.

Some of the specific suggestions that were made by the group:

• Build strong internal networks and relationships in order to develop predictability and agility for the learning organization
  
• Have discussions with lots of different parts of the organization in order to have a better sense of what’s coming in the future
• Figure out what this means in terms of business / learner needs, likely requirements, and constraints
• Get the key people in the room to brainstorm potential offerings
• Build prototypes to learn and later be able to sell
• Start real small on a project with no major impact
• Learn to be a Translator – often the barrier is different language being used by different parts of the organization.
• "Sneak it in"
• Share among distributed learning organizations
• Form a framework of offerings

The nice thing about this list is that it follows a process that I recommend around defining an eLearning Strategy.

Thanks to everyone who participated in this group or helped me last week via this blog to get prepared.

Dilbert Warns Me About Work Literacy

Should the following Dilbert worry me about Work Literacy?

Much of the idea of Work Literacy is to help people who need to keep up with how technology impacts knowledge work.

Maybe reading blog posts about the topic is okay :)

• Tool Set 2009
• Work Skills Keeping Up
• Top-Down Strategy
• Better Memory
• Information Radar
• Processing Pages with Links
• Networks and Learning Communities
• Collaborate
• Twitter as Personal Work and Learning Tool
• Search
• Browser Short Cuts
• Work Literacy Workshop

LearnTrends Starts Tomorrow

LearnTrends 2009 starts tomorrow!  I’m really looking forward to very interesting conversations around the messy topic of convergence. 

There seems to be quite a bit of last minute registration activity.  We have over 500 attending and over 140 who say they might attend.  Should be lively.  There will be lots of time for conversation as well.  Speakers generally are scheduled for half the time and half for discussion.

If for some reason you’ve not signed up (and read my blog)...

To register, you must first register on the LearnTrends community and then register on the Conference Event Page.

Look forward to “seeing” you tomorrow.