When new employees join at Upside Learning, I tell them – “Making mistakes is ok because you learn from them and that’s the real value of a mistake as it gets you ready for success. So go ahead, work with a free mind, give your best, and everything else would be fine”. Note that it’s not a license to make mistakes it is the freedom to try your best and be ok when you make mistakes. I also tell them “while committing mistakes is ok, repeating them is not, as then the mistake is really costly – to them and to the company, as we did not get anything (hoping for some learning there) out of it”

It’s been an interesting start of the week, with the tiny Regifting game going viral of sorts within our office. Hit the jump and you’ll see just why.
http://www.regiftable.com/regiftingrobinpopup.html

In November 1959, Donald Kirkpatrick published a series of seminal articles on training evaluation in the ‘Journal of the ASTD’. In the fifty years since, his thoughts (Reaction, Learning, Behavior, and Results) have gone on to evolve into the legendary Kirkpatrick’s Four Level Evaluation Model and become the basis on which learning & development departments can show the value of training to the business. How has the model evolved over fifty years, is it still relevant? As designers of learning, have we applied the model with Don’s intent?

I’ve been occupied with writing a paper to promote the adoption of mobile learning amongst corporates and enterprises. While trawling through multiple web-links, a pattern of myths about mobile learning emerges. Quite a bit of back and forth about these myths – I’m taking the liberty of listing and describing the five that struck me as odd, and am attempting to debunk them to an extent. I’ll be the first to admit there is always an element of truth behind myths; but with the rate of technological change, quite a few of those ‘truths’ would seem like falsehoods today.

Soon after I posted These are Not Serious Games on the blog and as a discussion on Linked-In, there was a flurry of comments over a couple of days that quickly covered some thoughts about Serious Games.

Recently I’ve been consulting with a customer on the design of a series of digital learning games for sales training. Most clients have done their research online about serious games, and find the whole gamut of samples, demos, etc. Clients typically have some thoughts about what they feel are serious games and whose game-play and mechanics they intended to emulate. Just one look at their collated ‘portfolio’ was enough to tell me that none of the content in the portfolio was really a serious game. What followed was the diplomatic squashing preconceived ideas about what serious games were in their (client’s) training context.

Upside Learning has picked up 2 awards at the 21st Annual Apex Awards for Publication Excellence 2009. You may ask – what is a learning solutions company doing at publication awards? Well, the core of what we do is communication and Apex has categories for the kind of work eLearning vendors do.

Yes, I know haven’t posted anything interesting last few days. That’s because I’ve been in training this week; and would you believe it was Retail Sales training. What’s an instructional designer doing attending sales training?

Elearning development tools: only Adobe?
Over the last ten years or so, major elearning developers have preferred to use tools like Flash, Authorware and Director from Adobe (earlier Macromedia). The reason was simple– it was an easier way to achieve the multimedia integration needed to deliver engaging content over variety of media (standalone CD based and then transitioning to web based).

I came across this interesting post by Cammy Bean about cultural differences in the use of audio in eLearning. Her colleague, Mark Harrison, believes that audio is used a lot less in eLearning in the UK than in the US and she is exploring the reasons for this.

Traditionally at Upside, we’ve always used one Saturday every month for training. Typically, this training is designed for functional groups and is followed by a creative activity where there is cross-functional participation.

There’s more talk about Digital natives going around; Jeremiah Owyang blogged from the Corporate Social Networking Conference in Amsterdam. Time and again, this talk about Digital natives and the millenials comes up, and there still isn’t much agreement about the key issues at hand.