Social Learning Blog

Archive | March, 2011

Re-evaluating Evaluation

by Barbara on March 16, 2011 in Evaluation

For years, I have dutifully included a description of Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Learning Evaluation in every proposal for every company I have worked with. And every company has agreed to use “Level 1: Reaction,” or―as it has come to be known—the “Smile Sheet.” Some companies will use “Level 2: Learning” to measure whether the learners have mastered the training course content. Hardly ever do they use “Level 3: Behavior,” and they never use “Level 4: Results.”

I have found this to be extremely frustrating. And as time has gone by, I have started to wonder about the validity of Kirkpatrick in today’s world. The focus is on the training event itself and the follow-up to that event. What is measured doesn’t seem to be what companies are interested in. Company executives are typically interested in the bottom line, not how well their employees apply the learning from a training …

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Twitter as Social Learning: Seven Ways to Facilitate the Exchange of Information

by Paul on March 14, 2011 in social learning

Most of us in the adult learning industry have already found and incorporated Twitter into our everyday lives. Where Facebook and LinkedIn serve mainly as social dashboards for our personal and professional networks, respectively, I see Twitter as a customized information portal. For those of you that use web-based aggregators like Google Reader but have not yet made room for Tweets, Twitter is an aggregator on steroids. Instead of waiting for your favorite journalist to write a thousand-word essay on Charlie Sheen’s shenanigans from the day before, you can hear directly from Mr. Sheen himself, the second he wants to speak.

Twitter gets a bad rap. From its childish name to its complex language of re-tweets and hashtags, many people tend to criticize the application before they try it. Since I became an active Twitter user a few months ago, the application has grown on me to the point …

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Can Games Transform the World?

by Jolene on March 11, 2011 in eLearning, Gaming Theory, Instructional Design, Training Development

Over the last year or so, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to incorporate games into eLearning instructional design projects. What I hadn’t stopped to fully consider is why I would do that. Games seem like a really cool way to add some fun to learning and seem to pose little or no risk to the learning outcome.

Fortunately, the question Why persists, and I am beginning to better understand why (and how) we should incorporate games in learning.

In his recent Wired article (March 2011) “Better Living Through Games,” Clive Thompson describes how editors at UK’s Guardian newspaper created a web app videogame to involve the public in analyzing millions of pounds’ worth of bogus personal expenses filed by British politicians.

The game randomly presented the players – the public – with the questionable receipts. If a receipt looked suspicious, players could write a description and hit an Investigate This! button. To …

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The Lonely eLearner: Creating Social Learning Anchors

by Andrea on March 9, 2011 in blended learning, eLearning, feedback, LMS (Learning Management System), social learning

The other day, I ran across Clive Shepherd’s recent blog post The New Social Learning – a review and I was struck by an observation he made there. The gist of it was that even though we have an enormous amount of tools available to enable social learning across far reaching boundaries, the self-study type of eLearning seen in so many workplaces today can potentially cut learners off from any type of social interaction during the course of the learning. This can be detrimental to learners who need that interaction to assess their new skills against others, discuss ideas, and gain new perspectives.

I agree with Clive’s observations on this topic. In my opinion, giving a learner a self-study eLearning program as their only form of training or support is not much different than handing them a manual to read with some exercises. In this lonely form of learning, there is …

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