Everyone’s been talking about Social Learning Environments (SLEs), the internet offers a plethora of tools that could become a part of a SLE. While some of these tools cost money, the bulk of them are free. We can construct our very SLE using these free tools. Jane Hart wrote about ‘How to Create a Social Learning Environment’ in the November 09 issue of Inside Learning Technologies. She covered the major tools that can be used to create a Social Learning Environment for free or at a low cost.
With our focus on mobile learning, we’re constantly attempting to address the multifarious platforms in the mobile technology space.
These days, phones are sophisticated, and some come with operating systems that allow for installation and removal of applications on the device. While this is a common and accepted paradigm on computers, its still relatively novel for mobile devices. Mobile devices in the past came with fixed features that couldn’t be altered, and a user had to make do with the functionality that shipped with the device.
That the LMS needs to incorporate social learning elements is no longer a point of debate but both a question of survival for the LMS itself and also a test of how the LMS handles the balance of both the elements of training and the ‘networkedness’ of the social learning. We’ve been hearing of experts commenting that LMSs today don’t come with appropriate social media technology built in.
We’d like to differ; the UpsideLMS comes with a unique social learning framework that lets users actually access such social tools from within the LMS in a robust and secure environment for connecting to and sharing with fellow users. Letting users move beyond routine training, into actual personal development.
As social technology growth continues to march on and dynamic learning grows to be the need of the day, it is little surprise that social media has now become an integral part of learning as well.
Various elearning development companies are integrating the popular social media services like Twitter, YouTube etc. right into their courses and LMS. A couple of months back, the Adobe Captivate blog demonstrated a twitter widget that can be integrated within a Captivate Flash output to send a tweet (as questions/suggestions/comments etc.) about the content of a learning module and get answers/opinions from others following the course tag. This is just one example. The options, however, are multifold.
Learning is fast turning Social, Informal, & Mobile.
That’s the message I’ve been hearing loud & clear from Learning Technologies 2010. 
While what’s being said in most of the sessions isn’t entirely new to us, it does reaffirm the direction in which things are going. The level of participation in these areas was clearly visible at the event which is a good sign. Adoption, after all, will happen only when L&D professionals start making some sense of it in first place.
Here are some highlights from the Day 1 sessions I attended:
A lot of companies today face a resource situation that’s not unique in this age. A few key individuals holding important technical and project management knowledge is quite common.
Jane Hart released the final list of top 100 tools for learning 2009 last month. It’s been created based on responses from 278 learning professionals worldwide and has taken several months to compile.
A study conducted by the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth on the Inc 500 (a list of fastest growing companies in US) reveals interesting trends on usage of Social Media. The 148 companies who responded were asked the same detailed questions concerning their usage and measurement of social media that were asked of the Inc. 500 approximately one year and two years earlier. Questions probed the familiarity of respondents with six prominent social media (blogging, podcasting, online video, social networking, message boards and wikis). In order to maintain the integrity of all comparisons, all those tools studied in the first two studies were included in this followup research. In 2009, several new tools were added including the popular microblogging service Twitter and other popular social networking sites like Linkedin, Facebook, and MySpace.
In my last post (Semantic Web Cometh), I mentioned how the underlying principles of the Semantic Web should make it highly inclusive and provide a uniform descriptive language across all sorts of media and technologies and consequently let users spend more time immersed meaningfully in the learning process.
The information age is rapidly turning into an age of information overload. A simple search of the web using a search engine like Google reveals a fantastic array of information. As I’ve discovered given the thousands if not millions of results, trying to sort through and make sense of any of that data is an exercise in futility. This sort of rudimentary search and pray approach isn’t effective, and grows more ineffective by the day with the growing size of the web. Why can’t it be easier? It can – Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web holds that promise.
