After being hooked onto Angry Birds, I now find myself fascinated by a collection of games hosted on a website called http://www.physicsgames.net.

As you must have already guessed, this website showcases numerous physics-based online games developed in Flash.

I recently came across a blog-post by Susan Weinschenk which provides a quick overview of ideal user experience guidelines from a psychologist’s point of view.

The article addresses a diverse set of user experience guidelines and standards and consists of some really practical and useful tips which can and ought to be implemented right away.

Here’s a quick summary of the points which I found to be relevant to eLearning and Instructional Design.

In a previous post I had discussed how changing technology might call for a change in approach to make implementing and managing change in an LMS more effective and fruitful. ‘Stakeholder engagement’ is a term commonly thrown around in the communications and project management worlds. One that, although there are many popular ‘buzz-words’, should not be overlooked. People are the core of everything and without the people’s buy in, support, and effort, any initiative will ultimately fall short.

Perhaps it’s a bit late; but you should check out this great Prezi presentation put together by Amy Burvall; Technotroubadours and Teacherpreneurs .

Recent research by ASTD and REED Learning reveals that measuring and evaluating learning is the top-most skill L&D teams are looking for.  From the report, here is the list of top 10 skills in demand:

Source: http://www.trainingzone.co.uk/node/167843/done?sid=31855

Does this tell us how the performance (read relevance) of L&D staff is being measured?

Came across this really interesting presentation about the growth of mobile internet in India by Mashable here – Mostly Mobile: How the Internet Is Consumed in India [INFOGRAPHIC]

Three factoids that strike me as being interesting:

Last week Towards Maturity published its latest report on e-learning adoption, utilization & effects in the European automobile industry. I worked in the automobile industry for a few years in the early part of my professional life. I remember attending a large number of classroom training sessions and video based training using VHS players which at the time were the only technology assisted learning at that time –between 1997 & 2000.  So I was quite keen to see what the report had to say about the state of learning technology use in the industry today.

There’s a definite movement towards delivering learning on tablets and mobile phones. It is quite common these days to get client requests for delivering elearning (meant for traditional desktops) or mobile learning (meant for mobile phones) solutions on tablets too. Is that a good idea? I think a more consciously chosen approach for tablets would be better in most cases, while sometimes just publishing to multiple devices may be suitable.

There has been a lot of talk about informal and social learning vs. formal learning. There is so much about it on the internet, that we wonder sometimes if formal learning has any sort of place in the future of learning at all. The fact hasn’t change, formal learning will exist in the future. There are a variety of reasons for it; but let’s just quickly delve into it a bit. With service industries ending up as major consumers of learning, the focus on knowledge is more pronounced, I sometimes feel it is the one key influence affecting the level of service a company can offer and profit from. The knowledge life-cycle is shortening, in some cases, products such as cars took five years or more to develop and roll-out.

HTML5 is adoption for mobile learning is picking up; perhaps the iPad is one driver of change , rapid improvements in regular and mobile browsers rendering HTML5 another. Recently, while speaking to customers, we encountered one of the primary issues that corporate stumble upon when deciding on HTML5 for pilots or technology exploration initiatives. Large companies, especially in the BFSI market need security built into their technology solutions. We have been aware of the security concerns around HTML5 and the mad scramble amongst browsers to implement ‘their’ way of rendering HTML5.

Make haste slowly
– Benjamin Franklin

We’re getting used to instant search, instant news, instant messages, instant updates, instant food, instant banking, and instant everything. In this world of instant gratification sometimes we need to take a moment and think is everything really necessary ‘now’?  Aren’t there things that need more time to be created properly, created beautifully?  While elearning itself helps the instant gratification needs of learners by being available whenever and wherever, elearning development needs little more time to be created well and can’t really be instant.

Recently Amit had written about how the eLearning industry and digital media in general has been driven to HTML5 by the rapid adoption of tablet computers, namely the iPad. To further reinforce that thought, Adobe announced just yesterday that it has ceased development on the Flash mobile browser plug-in. Meaning there will be no updates to those plug-ins and future versions of Android and Blackberry Playbooks may not be able to render Flash content.