Happy New Year & Cheers to a Wonderful 2010!

May this year be filled with many new & exciting experiences,
Good health & happiness, goals achieved & dreams realized,
Plus a whole heap of fun & memorable times with friends & family...

Our very best wishes,

@Schnicker and the team @Litmos

Top 10 Learning Journey Blog Posts for 2009

As December wraps up and the year draws to a close it's time to check in and see which 2009 posts were the most popular on the Learning Journey blog:

1. Top 10 Best Practices for Teaching Online
   
   
2. Top 6 Tips on Course Design Tips from an Instructional Designer
   
   
3. New Firefox: Update Adobe Flash Player
   
   
4. 7 Things to Avoid in Online Training Video Design
   
   
5. Top 5 Tips on Course Design from an Interaction Designer
   
   
6. 10 Great Online Training Resources
   
   
7. Top Screen Recording Tools
   
   
8. Online Learning More Effective Than Face to Face
   
   
9. Calling all Learning Professionals on Twitter
   
   
10. A Fundamental Shift in the Way we Conduct Learning
    

The real number one - that stands far out ahead of all the others by a gap of more than 3000 unique views - is still a post I wrote in August 2008 entitled 5 Key Characteristics of Generation Y. It seems this post just can't be beaten, not for a lack of trying!

Although our primary offering at Litmos is our learning management system, this blog has grown over the past three years to become a bustling little place for people from all different backgrounds to stop by and read up on their favorite online learning topics. Thank you to all of those people who read this blog and also to those who comment on my posts. Although I start the conversation, it is you who keeps it going and that's what keeps us all learning.

@Schnicker

Hip Hop Happy Holidays from Litmos!

It's not particularly original, and others have done it before - but we haven't! So please do enjoy our 'Happy Holidays 2009' hip hop dance routine, carefully choreographed and performed by Rich, Dan, Nicole and our favorite 4-legged office mascot, Sprocket.



Just a little something on the lighter side...
@Schnicker

Best Learning Apps for iPhone and iPod Touch

I was in the midst of researching learning apps for iPhone and iPod Touch for a blog post when I noticed that just yesterday Jane Hart published a list of exactly that! There's no point in re-inventing the wheel as it's a really great list of 75+ apps and includes the ones I had test driven.

The MFL (Modern Foreign Language) apps are pretty cool, they are mentioned in the Scribd document embedded at the end of Jane's list.

Here's the link for all those interested in learning on the go:

Learning Tools Directory: Apps for the iPod Touch / iPhone

@Schnicker

The Golden Triangle of Learning

"The three current big megatrends in the web/tech sector are mobile, social, and real-time. I like to think of this as the golden triangle"

This is a quote from Fred Wilson, VC and Principal at Union Square Ventures, in an article I read earlier this week. He says that these days if you have these three bases covered you're probably going to be successful. I would like to agree, but I guess time will tell. Both Fred Wilson and Brian Solis' posts (linked to above) offer great reading nonetheless.

Here's an interesting tidbit of information - we developed a Twitter/Yammer-like tool to run inside the Litmos learning management system a short time ago. When we offered it to a select group of our customers to give it a try, there was a unanimous"No thank you". The major reason given by these companies for not wanting to use a micro-blogging / sharing tool was that it would enable their 'silos' to communicate and this could lead to a 'ganging up' of sorts, on the management.

This brings us back to Mark Oehlert's Fear, Trust and Control talk from DevLearn09, which are without a doubt the major reasons why the adoption of new tools that encourage learning (collaboration, sharing, Social Media etc.) in the corporate sector is going to be a long time coming..

But back to Fred Wilson's quote which, although it is in reference to start-ups, could just as likely be applied to any business out there. In a corporate training context, if you are not making your training system accessible on the web/mobile devices, and if there is no social, collaborative element to the training (because we are social animals) and you're not offering a real-time connection to a trainer and/or peers, then it's probably about time you started thinking about how you're going to put those pieces of the puzzle in place.

@Schnicker

Can 'Travel' be a Learning Model?

The quotes below come from yesterday's #lrnchat session:

• 'Don’t need no SMEs [Subject Matter Experts]. Need subject matter networks instead.' Jay Cross 
  
  
• 'Are tomorrow’s SME’s today’s customers?' Harold Jarche
  
  
• 'I think the days of "designing learning" are numbered...research shows that people need a place/space to connect.' - Jane Bozarth
  

The general theme surfacing along with the prevalence of Social Media (SoMe) and the availability of cool collaborative learning tools, in combination with Gen Y coming through the ranks - is that even corporate learning is [very slowly] coming to terms with more of a 'provide the tools that encourage learning' approach, instead of a one-way information dictatorship.

If there's one thing that I re-learned at DevLearn09 it's that the old saying: 'you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink' rings very true. Or alternatively and maybe more appropriate: 'you can put a man through school but you cannot make him think' (now I'm quoting Ben Harper lyrics).

But new social and collaboration tools mean even the 'reluctant' learner - and those Gen Y'ers - can create their own canvases to share knowledge and in doing so, they help chisel out the learning needs of the group and pro-actively find the answers.


I've always considered 'travel' to be the ultimate learning experience. Travel is usually a voluntary choice as a result of a pro-active decision. It's often about putting yourself in to unfamiliar situations where you must adapt, learn new languages, culture, history, life skills, art - you name it - and it's such a fun way to learn! Therefore, maybe a very positive form of learning comes when a learner voluntarily places them self in to an unfamiliar environment and has to adapt?

Following that logic the new wave of learning could well be more about the acquired knowledge base that develops as a result of an organization putting itself in to the 'unfamiliar territory' represented by the social media, collaboration, and knowledge sharing tools and adapting. It's kind of like a package tour where all learners are safely seated inside the bus (organization), yet they are exposed to and can safely interact with the new environment on their own terms, and learn.

Now, just to solve the problem that 'traveling' isn't everyone's cup of tea...

Handy PowerPoint to Flash Converter

I've been sending a few Litmos clients over to the iSpring Solutions website lately to make use of their very cool PowerPoint to Flash converter and eLearning Authoring tools. These guys were part of the DevLearn09 Expo so I saw them there strutting their stuff.

If you haven't checked them out yet, they're definitely worth a look. They have some big featured customer names on their site (Johnson & Johnson, Boeing, IBM, Greyhound - just to name a few) and some great testimonials too. Here's what one customer is saying and I think this may well give some insight in to what makes these guys tick -

"iSpring is the only product out there that achieves almost 100% faithful conversion of even the most complex animation sequences, along with incredible ease of use, extensive customisation options and world-class technical support."

For more information on screen recorders - free or pay for, web-based or by download - check out the post called Top Screen Recording Tools.

@Schnicker