Entries Tagged 'tools' ↓

"What one has not experienced, one will never understand in print."
Isadora Duncan

I generally learn better by seeing something rather than reading about it .

Whatever. I haven’t owned a manual for Excel in a dozen years. Not that I’m an Excel master. Far from it. But I know I will never learn Excel from a book.

Doris Edwards sent me this three-minute lesson on creating a Gantt chart in Excel. She plans to put out a series in numerous languages. Pleasant, fun, effiicient, and soon to be on iTunes.

We don’t need no stinking courses. Give us grokkable, three-minute, learning fragments.

← Furthermore, I can’t resist Doris’s website logo.

Another Life: Virtual Worlds as Tools for Learning (03/22/07)

Virtual worlds (especially Second Life) have earned both tremendous media attention and millions of eager participants in recent months. Can these new 3-D environments transform online learning? Three eminently qualified observers—Jay Cross of Internet Time Group, IBM’s Tony O’Driscoll, and Eilif Trondsen of SRI-Business Intelligence—see great potential in online “learnscapes.” In an eLearn Magazine exclusive, they offer a thoughtful analysis of a phenomenon that is really just beginning to take hold.

Read the article, but then drop by Internet Time Wiki to play with our virtual worlds resources.

Some of us think, express ourselves, and understand better with visuals than with verbiage. A simple diagram can show relationships better than a page of text and takes but a fraction of the time to understand. When I’m preparing an article, a talk, a white paper, or a big project, I invariably begin with a mindmap. It’s faster than writing an outline.
Bubbl.us is a free, online, Flash-based mindmapping tool. It’s incredibly easy to use. Of course, it lacks the features of MindJet, but it captures 80% of what I need: the basic picture and conections, e.g.,

Bubbl.us is joining my online toolset. Give this one a try. And share your maps with us!

Erratum: It’s http://www.bubbl.us. No “e”.

The first World Cafe took place in this room in the home of Juanita Brown and David Isaacs in Mill Valley, California:

The World Cafe vision is to shape the world as cafe, that is, to promote the concept that we can design, convene, and host conversations to address significant questions. David calls this “conversational leadership.” Our collective self is becoming self-aware. We are at the appropirate time in history to boost our collective intelligence through dialogue.

David Isaacs

I’m excited by the opportunity to augment The World Cafe by multiplying two-way connections, moving from push to pull, and building a Learnscape an ecology that enables participants to learn from one another and become self-sustaining.

I’m probably overstepping my bounds here; Juanita was in Florida on family matters. Also, given that one of my suggestions was to invite general participation in the renewal process, this is more brainstorming than planning.

Buy this:

Amazon has dropped the price of Informal Learning by 15%.
I have no clue how long this will be in effect.
This morning you can buy Informal Learning for $34.40.

Buy your copy now.

Also, the entire text is searchable on Amazon. I’m go to be using this feature myself.

Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Natural Pathways That Inspire Innovation and Performance

Jay Cross

ISBN: 0-7879-8169-9, Paperback, 320 pages.    

 

The Book   Buy it!   Poster   Resources   References   Research   Search the text   Surprise me!   Testimonials   YouTube video

Contents   Preface. Acknowledgments. Introduction.   CONCEPTS. Chapter 1: Out of Time. Chapter 2: A Natural Way of Learning Chapter 3: Show Me The Money. Chapter 4: Emergence. Chapter 5: Connecting. Chapter 6: Meta-Learning.     LEARNERS. Chapter 7: Learners.     CASES. Chapter 8: Envisioning. Chapter 9: Conversation. Chapter 10: Communities. Chapter 11: Unblended. Chapter 12: The Web. Chapter 13: Grokking.     Appendix Bibliography References Resources Testimonials Index About the Author

 

 

Evaluation  copies

It is hard to miss all the Web 2.0 talk – it’s everywhere, every magazine, every newspaper, and thousands of Blogs. Some have even called it a mindset and not a specific technology or tool. Just like the rise of eLearning in the mid to late nineties, Web 2.0 is giving rise to the notion of Learning 2.0. The world of Web 2.0 Learning promises to be more exciting than anything we’ve seen before in technology based learning and performance in the last two decades.

Instancy Presents the First Exclusive Conference Event:

Web 2.0 Meets Enterprise Learning!

April 25th 2007
Time: 2 PM to 5 PM EST
Cary, North Carolina
IT’S FREE!

Jay Cross & Harvey Singh

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The Soundbites of Training 2007
(second attempt)

Nanocasts are mini-podcasts are one to four minutes in length impromptui, not reheased cut to the chase These are from Training 2007.	My recorder is a Casio Exilim camera. It’s an amazing gizmo. Tiny. Thin. And can record an hour of video.
Nanocast with Frank Russell, GEO Learning	GeoLearning picked up the tab for Roger McGuinn.
Nanocast with Bjorn Brillhardt, Enspire Learning	Bjorn’s on the right. I’ve watched him grow Enspire from five guys working out of a house to a 50+ employee simulation powerhouse.
Nanocast with Howard Siebel, Veotag
Nanocast with Tony O’Driscoll, IBM Altus Learning Systems ProtonMedia	O’Driscoll Castle. I couldn’t find a good photo of Tony.
Nanocast with Harvey Singh, Instancy Training Growth Strategies, April 24-25, Cary, North Carolina	He looks better in person.

Do you think there’s a future for Nanocasting? Leave a comment.

Join Eileen Clegg and me for a two-day Writing on the Walls workshop in beautiful Bodega Bay, California, May 17-18.

Bodega Bay is a quiet, coastal town about 70 miles north of San Francisco. It offers golfing, sea kayaking, whale watching, surfing, and miles of beaches to explore. The workshop will take place at the Bodega Bay Lodge. I snapped this photo of the bay from just below our meeting room at the Lodge.


Knowing how to draw is not a prerequisite. (See above: my first attempt to describe the Uncommunity.) I attended a session with Eileen back in January, but I’m returning both to weave visual journalism into the informal learning fabric and to improve my skills.

Enrollment is limited to ten participants. Fee of $1,800/person includes all graphic materials and Visualization Workbook. Send me an email if you’d like to join us.

On January 26, 2007, I posted a ten-minute talking-head video on informal learning to YouTube. To-date, 982 people have watched it. Four people have linked to it online. Two people evaluated it. One person named it a favorite; another left a comment.

Update: 3/8/07. Another five hundred people have watched my video. Damned if I know why.

Further update: 3/15/07. And another eight hundred, bringing the total to 2,200.

And another: 5/27/07. More than 5,000 people have watched the video.

If they watched all the way to the end, that would be 50,000 minutes, or 830 hours, or more than a month of viewing. I hope this is not the same person, someone with a peculiar fixation on informal learning.

Vyew provides a virtual space to share information and to work together. Get your point across visually. Host live conferences and interact in real-time. Post documents and presentations for review and commenting anytime. It’s free. I’ve never been shy about promoting what I like, and I like Vyew a lot.

Vyew just came out of beta. We’ve used it extensively in our Unworkshops. The Unworkshops are morphing into an ongoing learning community. A list of View features is below the fold. Vyew is headquartered right here in The People’s Republic of Berkeley.
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