As it’s the end of January we thought we’d chip in on what the rest of the year could bring, although rather than predictions we’re adding each of our top 3 wishes – which makes a total of 6!

More of this…

fMRI: the king of man-made technologies for learning
It’s been around for a while, but with it now being applied to see our brain as we learn it’s jaw dropping stuff. At LIMBIC we love the brain. This should and will give us deeper insight into how our brain processes information, and learns – let’s hope we can use these findings as they emerge and package them into some well formulated practical guidelines. Considering we know so much already, and solutions use so little of it… we’re not too optimistic

Neuromarketing meets e-learning
It strikes us that this is a gaping cavern of a missed opportunity – but I’m sure if realised we’ll get a spate of gurus jumping on this next potential bandwagon (don’t you just love ‘em!). Not sure of its potential? Then just do a little bit of research…

Independent expertise
Organisations bringing in someone who is channel neutral, technically savvy, and pedagogically aware. This will add immense value to learning strategy

Less of this…

Learning technologies
This term is so bad. Let’s have a reality check: technology is created by highly capable people with learning having a small impact. When there’s technology we simply need to ask: “can and how does this technology help with learning?”

This is sure to cause a bit of contention, but we don’t see it as a specific branch of technology, I wish we’d get away from that – it’s simply more channels to use. So many times this expression has skewed thinking with people we meet that we avoid it at all costs

Organisational control of learning
This is tricky. It depends on your culture, on your people. Not every organisation has every individual bursting with ambition – another reality check. The so called learning organisation will be driven by the culture the employees create. But to embrace the benefits of collaborative technologies and employee generated content, some seismic shifts need to happen

Branding
More unbranding! Remove the ideas of training, and even learning. LMSs, learning portals, academies, universities, the list goes on. Google, Wikipedia, YouTube – I don’t see the langauge of learning or training here, so let’s learn from this…

If you have a specific topic you’d like us to cover then let us know and we’ll see what we can do!

Although its focus is PowerPoint, its relevance to e-learning is a no brainer! Enjoy.

…then don’t miss out on a great podcast interview by Ginger Campbell with John Medina.

Brain Rules with Dr. John Medina

We could paraphrase things here – but our advice is simply listen and enjoy for yourself.

John’s book (Brain Rules) is a must read, and certainly one of our current favourite ‘brain’ books at present. And the website for the book is certainly worth enjoying too. There are a number of things we could take on board from these points – and even the Doing E-learning podcasts will try to take account of the principles.

By the way, if having listened to the cast you want to see how your brain copes counting basketball catches then check it out at Illinois Unversity’s Visual Cognition Lab, where you can also find other experiments.

Very timely as two days later the eLearning Network is hosting a live debate on the subject – Rapid e-learning: dumbing down or gearing up?

Don’t forget to subscribe so that you get each one as it comes!

It seems to have been a hectic few weeks in the e-learning tools market, not least in ‘rapid’ tools.

Many of the established names have either been releasing newer versions of their tools, or promising new releases later in the year – as well as a few new entrants to the market, with none other than Microsoft making a sneaky appearance!

Raptivity 5.0 has been talking up its ‘rich text formatting options’. Atlantic Link released news on how courses can now be developed directly to the native screen sizes for the Sony PSP Slim & Lite. RapideL-i announced a ‘host of new features’ and a total of 100 templates!

And Adobe continues to grow its e-learning offering with its updated Acrobat Connect Pro 7 – due at the end of this month – which will be pushed as a ‘large-scale web conferencing tool’.

All of the above without mentioning Microsoft’s truly ’soft’ launch of its *FREE* Learning Content Development System (LCDS), which appeared at the backend of April.

As part of a recent project, one of us here at LIMBIC had to trial a vast number of the ‘rapid tools’. The market is a huge battleground at the moment, with a vast number of them out there adding and improving what’s on offer in a series of head to heads – and that can only be good.

It has to be said that the findings didn’t come as any real surprise, but it will be interesting to hear about his research and ponder how it could benefit Instructional Design.

In a teaser to whet our appetite, Buschkühl comments on the adaptive, complex and transferable aspects of the technology based puzzle he used, stating: “technology, when designed and used well, can expand the realm of the possible.”

Now that’s the best endorsement for effective e-learning we here at Doing E-learning have heard in a long time. ]]> http://www.limbiclearning.co.uk/blog/e-brain-training/feed 0 http://www.limbiclearning.co.uk/blog/microsoft-e-learning-free-good-news http://www.limbiclearning.co.uk/blog/microsoft-e-learning-free-good-news#comments Wed, 07 May 2008 05:52:00 +0000 Keith and Dom http://localhost/doingelearning/wordpress/?p=24 Since the latter half of April, Microsoft’s venture into the e-learning tools market has been upon us.

Over the past few weeks there’s been the odd post here and there mentioning Microsoft’s recently launched Learning Content Development System (LCDS) (download the 44Mb file for free if you want). But talk about it has only slowly been building momentum.

Like the ‘rapid e-learning’ tools currently out there it’s got a template approach, and outputs SCORM 1.2 compliant material. We’ve downloaded it at Doing E-learning and have it on our computers, but as yet haven’t found the time to check it out!

Hopefully Kineo will soon add this one to their review list and we’ll all be the wiser with minimal effort!

All indications point to a shift towards e-learning, but this venture for small businesses has to be cost efficient. It’ll be interesting to see which route(s) they go down – if they want true effectiveness then surely not just off the shelf courses. Formal DIY courseware, and informal web 2.0 content seem the most likely alternatives. But which will come out on top? Will the great revolution in ‘learning 2.0′ be driven by ‘the little guys’?

In the States wikis do appear to be flavour of the moment for sales training, with one success story even making it into The Wall Street Journal last month.

But will this approach be limited to organisations who have highly motivated individuals?

We happened across a fascinating CNN article a while ago on research at the Primate Research Institute (Kyoto University), where a number of chimps have been learning linguistic skills.

The experiment below is on working memory and numerals. Ayumu is shown a series of unique numbers (between 1 to 9) in random locations on a screen. After 0.21s, each number is then covered by a blank square – at which point Ayumu has to press on the blank boxes to match the original numerical sequence.

Play the clip below before reading on – make sure you’re concentrating

Amazing – and Ayumu didn’t even appear to be concentrating that hard!

When repeated with students (who spent 3 months practising) they couldn’t equal this chimp’s feat (80% accuracy, cf. 40% for the students).

One aspect of success was age: the ability to remember a ’snapshot’ of information decreases with onset of adulthood (young chimp vs. adult human). A theory on top of this is that the human brain ‘loses’ some of its working memory abilities to be able to apply itself to bigger and better things – for example language, and higher order thinking.

If you want to know more about Ayumu and his friends, click here.