Synapsys Blog - September 2004

Favourite Books

Here are some of the books that have informed our thinking and provided inspiration for our projects:

Blended Learning: How to Integrate Online & Traditional Learning
by Kaye Thorne

Digital Game-Based Learning
by Marc Prensky

The Experience Designer: Learning, Networks and the Cybersphere
by Brian Alger

Simulations and the Future of Learning : An Innovative (and Perhaps Revolutionary) Approach to e-Learning
by Clark Aldrich

e-Learning and the Science of Instruction : Proven Guidelines for Consumers and Designers of Multimedia Learning
by Ruth Colvin Clark, Richard E. Mayer

Designing World-Class E-Learning : How IBM, GE, Harvard Business School, And Columbia University Are Succeeding At E-Learning
by Roger Schank

What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy
by James Paul Gee

Situated Learning : Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive & Computational Perspectives)
by Jean Lave, et al

Cultivating Communities of Practice
by Etienne Wenger, et al

Simulations: Interactive Pretending

Marc Prensky has just released a new batch of writings, including a short paper called 'Interactive Pretending: an Overvew of Simulations' that reminds us in simple terms that simulations are really exercises in useful pretending. Simulations allow us to expose learners to situations that they might encounter in the real world some day, but cannot be easily trained in for reasons of safety or infrequency. This might range from how to fly an airplane, to how to deal with a difficult patient or how to effectively manage a natural disaster.

This paper is a good primer on the emerging area of training simulations, for those interested in learning more.

More here...

How's Your eLearning?

Another great reality check for us, this time from Badrul H. Khan. In this article, he reminds us to think of an organsation's learning environment as part of a system that includes learners, instuctors, staff and many other stakeholders. He uses the term 'meaningful learning' which echoes our concern with creating solutions that are truly effective...

Badrul writes:

"About two years back, I asked a friend if his institution was doing any eLearning. He said, "Oh, yes, we have an LMS and we are doing all sorts of eLearning stuff." I said, "Having an LMS does not necessarily mean that you are creating meaningful eLearning." He asked, "Meaningful eLearning-what do you mean?"

More here...

Making Personas More Powerful

We have written before about how valuable we find personas and how we use them in our work. We were really excited to find this great article by George Olsen that takes the idea even further, and highlights tangible ways of making personas multi-dimensional and most importantly, actionable. Though tailored towards a web business audience, educators and trainers should find this helpful, as well.

The piece includes a link to Olsen's persona toolkit that includes information on:

- Biographic, geographic, demographic, psychographic background information
- The business’ relationship to the persona
- The persona’s relationship to product and business
- The persona’s specific goals, needs and attitudes
- The persona’s specific knowledge and proficiencies
- The context of usage
- Interaction, information, sensory, emotional aspects of the user experience
- Accessibility issues
- Relationships among personas

More here...

Informal Learning - The Other 80%

This interesting paper by Jay Cross addresses the phenomenon of 'informal learning', an activity that is purported to make up 80% of a person's learning on the job. The premise is simple: learning is a social activity (lots of learning theorists agree with this idea) and learning occurs most often on the job when people go to other people for help. The paper also address concepts around how people like to learn and what many of the Web's most successful tools can tell us about future possibilities for learning technologies. Very interesting stuff.

http://www.internettime.com/Learning/The%20Other%2080%25.htm#_Toc40161516

'Knowledge Sharing' Reality Check

This short article makes the very important point that 'knowledge sharing' as an explicit or designed activity isn't likely to be nearly as successful as simply encouraging people to talk to each other when they have problems.

Read more....

Fostering a Culture of Knowledge Sharing

This article offers a great reminder that putting tools and processes in place to manage knowledge flow is only half the battle. Fostering a culture that values knowledge and encourages sharing and resourcefulness is key:

"Sharing knowledge takes effort and skill, even between two people talking face-to-face. You don't create that by writing stuff down; you create it by creating robust relationships that give people the confidence to ask questions and learn from each other, and by encouraging the disciplines of asking questions without wasting people's time, and of answering questions with clarity and power, of telling vivid stories within a shared value system. These are the things that matter, the things businesses need to be good at."

More here...

Implementing an eLearning Project

This is a very enlightening article that stresses a deeply-held Synapsys belief, the importance of a design-centred but well-balanced team approach that is central to making eLearning projects successful.

Read the article, Why eLearning is So Difficult to Eat, here...

The Promise of Simulations

We found this to be a well-written article on the promise (and some pitfalls) of using simulations as a learning platform. Of particular note is the commentary about when simulations are appropriate and why some past efforts have failed: "Overenthusiastic e-learning vendors have touted simulations in many areas where they should not have been used. Many companies that first adopted them were disappointed with the results. All too often, unfortunately, learning objectives were ignored in order to provide clients with the 'wow' factor. Simulations looked good, but little learning occurred."

http://www.clomedia.com/content/templates/clo_feature.asp?articleid=382&zoneid=29

Emergent Learning

It's always interesting when someone comes up with a new name for an existing phenomenon. In this case, the term 'emergent learning' has been coined to describe the bottoms-up, inter-connected approaches to learning that we're beginning to recognise in a lot of organisations. (Jay Cross, the author, even suggests that we replace the term 'e-learning' with emergent learning). But regardless of what we call it, the great news is that these grassroots learning activities no longer have to hide in the dark.

"Learning has become a core business process. Emergent learning enables us to push beyond the confines of e-learning to explore combinations with informal learning, storytelling, social network analysis, appreciative inquiry, workflow learning, conversation, contextual collaboration, organic KM, simulation, dynamic portals, expert location and blogs."

More at: http://www.internettime.com/blog/archives/001324.html

The New Knowledge Management?

We're very interested in ideas around the evolution of knowledge management and how it fits into an organisation's training strategy. Dina Mehta's blog just provided us a new piece of the puzzle -- the idea that effective knowledge management is more about the flow of knowledge than the collection or dissemination of it. So, the most important thing is to have collaboration spaces that allow access to people who know stuff. Not a new idea, certainly, but there are a host of nifty technologies enabling this kind of real-time access to people.

More from Dina here:

http://radio.weblogs.com/0121664/2004/02/19.html#a374