Saturday 28 April 2012

How can learning technologies help you or your organisation?


I keep getting asked for advice from all sorts of professionals about how technology can help them and their organisations – hence this post.  Most of my work is around learning technologies, so here I suggest some examples to ponder:

Re: Examples of e-learning techniques

Most of the stuff I do is password protected.  Below are some of my examples and examples from others demonstrating the type of things I think you might find useful.

Video:

Here is one that I did a while back with colleagues, introduction new students to the SCONUL service – using a presentation technique developed by Lee LeFever of CommonCraft:


Screen Casts:

Most of mine aren’t public, but below is an example from a colleague introducing Blackboard to academic staff, and a very old example of mine when YouTube didn’t allow high quality video:

Web Conferencing

The product we’re trialing at this year is Blackboard’s Collaborate – here’s a 4 minute overview from Blackboard themselves:

Online discussion

Access to my University’s online discussions is password restricted.  However, there is a wealth of publically accessible material presenting the concept and suggesting why it is significant.  On the following link Alan Eisenberg (a corporate communications expert) outlines how online learning has moved from content presentation to engagement of an audience – and a significant vehicle for engagement is online discussion.  He hints at elements of the ‘community of practice’ I’ve been going on about … specifically, to facilitate “ … the people who were trained to help the people who are getting the training …” (0:58).  There is a wealth of evidence around people who are encouraged to discuss their practice with others becoming better at what they do – something I think leading organisatios may want to foster – to be seen as responsible for building those communities of practice.


The best way for me to offer any advice is to have a meeting, preferable face to face, where I can get more of an idea of what your or your organisation does and therefore tailor my suggestions of techniques and technologies with specific examples from your practice.  I'd welcome a conversation - so please get in touch!

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