Learning, Technology & Change

This month's Learning Circuits Big Question should be near and dear to all instructional designers. Teaching face-to-face or  always requires engagement first. Engagement leads to better attention, and retention. Fun is a major way to engage. So... How do you make e-learning fun? Thanks to folks like Clark Quinn games are receiving more mainstream acceptance and adoption in eLearning circles. More developers are looking to offer instruction through games. Games provide intrinsic motivation, peer recognition, opportunities to explore, individual accountability and choice. I recently experimented with FourSquare. At face value you check-in to allow friends to know where you are. The value proposition for 4SQ is to mine the demographic goldmine by knowing where and how often people go places and allow them to be marketed to accordingly. Why do it? For the Points!! and the Badges. the recognition provides the motivation to keep one engaged and continuously checking in. Game me...

As an owner of a Flip camera, I was disappointed to hear that Cisco has decided to sunset it's Flip camera operations.At the same time I see the same writing on the wall that motivated this move.  The handheld video market has been sandwiched in two directions. First from smartphones and their increasingly better cameras in a highly portable multi-purpose device, and second from Digital SLRs shooting HD video in better quality. As an owner myself, with the wife's iphone and my android, the flip, continued to be forgotten at home. And most importantly, not missed. It remains a great niche device, but I like many others I suspect are willing to sacrifice the user experience for portability. This was a  great device at home with a young baby, but newer smartphones and more critical things to pack like diapers, food and drink.  Despite our 1st world entitlement people make some (small) sacrifices in quality for portability (see mp3). In our disposable culture, many new tech...