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 it does almost every month, this month's ASTD question is something I'm currently grappling with: What is the Scope of our Responsibility as Learning Professionals? Let's start by clarifying the question, by asking more questions. Do instructors need to adapt to Long Tail Learning ? What's an instructor's traditional scope of learning? Is an instructor's ultimate role to help students or teach certain content? I think Long Tail learning is a fact of life that cannot be ignored. We could choose to not acknowledge it but that would only serve to marginalize ourselves. The long tail is the way things work, and we must embrace it. A learners attention is split in so many different ways. Our tools now embrace this through RSS, and other cross-linking capabilities. Now our methods and approach must also embrace it. When classroom discussions go off on a tangent it might be impractical to enable it. There is material to cover in a fixed amount of time. A skilled i...