Tech4learning

Rapid Intake - Desktop and Web-based Rapid E-learning in Unison

A few months ago, I spent a while researching rapid e-learning authoring tools and found myself having to decide whether I wanted to go down the non-collaborative desktop software route - feature packed - or forego some of the functionality and choose a web-based collaborative authoring tool option.

I choose the former then, but am still longing for an online SaaS solutioin that is not only feature-rich but also affordable for those with modest budgets and smaller target audiences.

I'm still looking but was interested when I stumbled about Rapid Intake who offer two authoring tools in versions for the desktop and for the browser.

ProForm is the desktop version.  This enable non-Flash programmers to create rapid e-learning courses, with all the usual features.

Unison is the browser (web)-based version.  The colloborative element of this version is enhanced with access to Rapid Intake's third product, CleanCourse, which is a very useful online project management and tracking tool for e-learning developers.

Rapid Intake's website is also packed full of useful resources for all rapid e-learning developers, which also reinforces the high level of support options that are offered as standard to all their clients.

The Social Media Handbook

A tip off from Amazon.com led me to order a new book from the UK website, based purely on the title and a very brief synopsis.  So when it arrived, not really sure what I was going to get, I was intrigued by The Social Media Handbook.

It's a large book, just over 500 pages and larger than A4 - more like a musical score in size, or one of those popular "games that trainers play" volumes.  Flicking through the book I saw pages and pages of footnotes and references and some interesting "font" discrepancies in places, alongside a variety of graphics in different "house styles".  Was this the result of a student project?  Then I studied the preface and rear cover and realised this was a true collaborative effort.  To quote directly from the text:

Topic relevant selected content from the highest rated Wiki entries, typeset, printed and shipped, combine the advantages of up-to-date and in-depth knowledge with the convenience of printed books.

So the many short and easy to follow chapters, with their frequent references and links to related sources of information, are in fact pieces of content from other digital sources, interpreted and assimilated into a paperback book.

The "handbook" is really a digest of a wide variety of social media tools.  Starting with a series of "articles", the contributors discuss the main themes of social media from "user generated content" through to blogging, wikis and "crowdsourcing", which was a new on on me.

The following sections highlight some of the most popular and not so well known tools in the categories of Communication, Collaboration and Multimedia, Reviews and Opinions and Entertainment.  For each tool, there is a summary table, followed by what can only be described as Wikipedia-like narrative.

You get quick tours and background information to tools such as Blogger, TypePad and Wordpress; Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn; and Ning, Plaxo and Meetup.com.  You can read up on Wikipedia, Wetpaint and Delicious and learn more about Google Reader and Digg.  Flickr, YouTube and last.fm are also featured, along with Epinions and Yahoo! Answers.  Finally, you can look further into Second Life, The Sims Online and Forterra Systems.

If you're researching social media and their use for learning and development, then this is probably a good starting point.  The contributors have certainly done a lot of the groundwork for you. 

Notching Up Ning

Ning just got better!

A while ago I posted a review of the new Ning for Dummies book and commented how this book gave lots of useful pointers to using this popular tool to create learning communities.

Well, a few days ago, Ning announced that they had added over 90 app-like widgets to the tool, so-called Ning Apps.  So I thought I'd take a look at some of them to see how they could be used to create further learning opportunities for site members.

In summary, there are five main categories of Ning App:

1. Collaboration
2. Communication
3. E-Commerce
4. Fun and Games
5. Fundraising

I started off by looking at those that concentrated on collaboration.

As well as Google Docs and the many programs that make up the Zoho range, I particularly liked the VoxBox application.  This application produced by a company called Sapplica enables you to:

• Create suggestion topics and solicit suggestions
• Allow community members to add suggestions and rate on suggestions
• Create polls and participate in polls

Staying with polling, there's an app version of PollDaddy, a comprehensive polling and survey tool.

Encouraging community contribution of material found on the web and then appraising it, is facilitated by the NewsShare app, a version of Slinksetwhich allows your network to share and rate what's interesting online. Your members submit, rate and discuss all the new and interesting links they find. The result is a source of all the best news and content from around the web according to your community.

The last app to catch my eye in this category was ClackPoint.  ClackPoint (currently in beta) provides live audio, video and text chat for your social network. Users can call in either directly from the web page, or by using a telephone and entering a PIN (with both US and UK phone numbers).

In the area of communication, there are video-based chat group chat rooms from Zorap and Tokbox, amongst other chat services.

If you run paid-for events for your community, then you might like the EventBee app, which enables you to offer a complete end-to-end event management service.

Now I know that offering games and puzzles on websites can generate a lot of activity, whether or not you regard the games as part of the learning experience.  So if you think the same, there are six pages of apps in this category including both word and number puzzles.  You can even create your own virtual world within your Ning site - SmallWorlds.

Thinking about it, even if you don't have a Ning site, some of these apps and their parent products would offer a good range of e-learning tools.

Online Coaching Support - Side by Side

Now I've long been particularly interested in how technology can be applied to the transfer of learning back into the workplace.  For although the e-learning industry has grown up around the concept of delivering learning, all forms of training have suffered from poor rates of learning transfer.  So regardless of whether your organisation is behind the delivery of content via e-learning or not, there should be room to use systems that reinforce the full learning cycle.

One particular application of technology is to support coaching programmes.  So a new reference to a US-based tool reminded me of a long established UK-based service, so I thought I'd use this posting to highlight both.

Starting closer to home, mye-coach offers a range of featuresto support the organisational coach in keeping on top of their coaching programme and providing the follow-through for each coachee.  As well as offering a written record of coaching conversations, the service offers 165 tools to support all aspects of the coaching process and for coaching in many different areas.  Each tool will either provide a summary of a given topic, a diagnostic instrument, a post-coaching session activity, a knowledge handout or a coach's session guide. 

As an added bonus for visiting their website, the team at mye-coach also offer a range of free coaching resources.

Over in the States, Coach Assistantoffers an online resource that similarly captures a record of the relationship between the coach and their coachee.  But whereas mye-coach looks at the one-to-one aspects of coaching, Coach Assistant also picks up on the sometimes collaborate nature of coaching with a range of features targeting groups of learners working with a facilitator/coach.  You can also upload your own attachments that could provide both educational and follow-up resources for your coachees. 

In some ways both tools are similar in that they are hubs for a wealth of supporting resources.  From my own personal knowledge of mye-coach, this tool very much leans to the true field of coaching, whereas Coach Assistant would look particularly strong in the field of coaching as part of an integrated distance learning approach.

With internal coaching in particular showing itself to be good development option when training expenditure is under pressure, tools such as these will help to leverage this process.

Grow Your Own Social Network

For many of us, our first attempt to create an online social network has been based on pointing our browser to Ning.com and fumbling around seeing what happened when you clicked here or there; and all the time comparing our first efforts to other established networking sites or other Ning-based networks that always looked so much more inviting than ours.  Now I'm the sort of guy who likes to have a sense of where he's going and what's possible, so I was delighted last year to notice that the For Dummies series was planning to tackle this piece of web-based software.

The book finally saw the light of day a few weeks ago and I've been reading it in phases.  My first impressions were so favourable that based on what I had read that week, I encouraged another fledgling Ning site developer to persevere with her endeavours.

After giving you a quick tour of a typical Ning site, the author encourages you to join an existing Ning site so you can explore further before even beginning to think about your own site.  Still from the perspective of a regular site member, you are shown how to get the most from the network you joined, including adding multimedia content, communicating with the other members and interacting with others.

Only when you've truly experienced the potential of a Ning site, does the book go on to show you how to take the plunge and create your own network.

You look at the structure and appearance of your site, before going on to customise your home page and organising your members.  You are shown how to exploit forums, notes and chats, as well as how to manage the different types of multimedia you can use, together with getting the most from membership groups and events.

As your site grows in popularity, the author provides you with guidance on the appointment and management of supporting administrators, before looking at some of the ways you can find new members and promote your network.

A high level but still practical chapter on using Google Analytics to learn more about the performance of your network is followed by tactics to keep your network alive and kicking.

The final section looks at how you can further leverage your Ning site by purchasing some of the site's premium services, how you can overhaul the look and feel with CSS code, use the Language Editor to localise the site for different nationalities and embed so-called OpenSocial Applications into the site.

As always with a For Dummies book, the last "Part of Tens" chapter summarises different ways to make money from your site, add further spice to your network and find tools to help manage the environment.

Overall, this book combines both the mechanics of building a Ning site, with a more general discussion of how to successful establish and nurture a successful social network site.

New Things in the Box

One of my early blog postings was about the web-based file storage and sharing service, Box.net.  At the time I thought that the file sharing aspect would be good support for a collaborative learning situation.

Now they've recently added a number of features which actually help to more clearly position this service as possible collaborative learning platform:

Tasks enables you to build a workflow around a specific content item, such as review a document (maybe an assigment), upload a new version (i.e. the completed assignment) and approve it (aka grade it).

Global Folders enables you to open up a folder to a wider audience in the form a specific website, either pubically or for an invited audience only.  This would enable you to post the entire content for a course online.

Web Documents brings the power of the wiki to your Box.net account.  You can create to-do lists, share research, write meeting notes and draft documentation with your invited collaborators.

With just these three features Box.net has turned their file hosting service into a much more powerful tool that would support collaborative learning.

Huddle and Collaborate

Digging deeper into LinkedIn, I noticed an application link for a web-based collaborative working tool, Huddle.

Now I've used other similar tools in the past such as Google Sites and BaseCamp, all of which had their pros and cons.  So I was keen to take a look and seeing that it was also free to start with this tool, I took the plunge and signed up.

As well as a homepage that doubles as your dashboard, you can use whiteboards that offer similar features to some of the more rudimentary wikis, assign tasks to yourself and others (with the ability to add deadlines in - a feature amazingly often overlooked by competing systems), hold threaded discussions and organise online meetings, as well as maintain profiles of team members.

With regard to the online meetings, although not offering a true web-conferencing system, you can integrate other tools by including a link to that platform within the meeting invitation.  But what I was really pleased to see was the automatic inclusion of an integrated teleconferencing service, with a good spread of dial in numbers for European countries, including a very favourable call rate of 8p per minute for the UK.  Using this service in conjunction with a free web-conferencing service such as DimDim, which only offers a US dial-in number, would be a great combination.

Another attractive feature of Huddle was the ability to create Word and Excel documents without having to have either of these packages installed on your computer.  The web-based software for this is provided by the popular Zoho service.  It was a shame that they don't yet offer the option to use Zoho's presentations software package.

You can enjoy the service for free, but when you outgrow your 1GB storage limit, you can upgrade to other packages for a monthly fee.

To Twit or Not To Twit...

This article on the BBC News website has stirred up some discussions on some training forums.

It would seem that the vast majority of postings are from a small minority of users and that many users fall into the categories of either those who visit the once only, or only post every few months.  To date, I'm very much in the latter camp as I too have struggled to really get going with this as a communications or social networking media.

I've struggled with its usability and - to be honest - its purpose.  And I've not really seen any evidence of its wide-spread adoption in corporate learning and development solutions - even as a pilot.

But I've recently added two books to my bookshelf in an attempt to get "under the bonnet".

The Twitter Book by Tim O'Reilly and Sarah Milstein (hashtag #TwitterBook - read the book to find out what that's about) was my first investment - hot of the press as it was only published a few days ago.

This is a very quick read - it keeps moving apace - and works by using a written commentary on the right-hand side, opposite one of more screen grabs of real Twitter examples.  I liked the honest of the authors when they wrote, "[Twitter] can be surprisingly hard to figure out.  The screens aren't particularly intuitive, and the jargon and symbols are obscure.  Even more vexing, it's not clear at first why people are so enthusiastic about Twitter."  Given the results of the recent survey and my own thoughts, this one comment made me want to read the book so I could be enlightened.

The book covers the basics of getting started, goes on to get you familiar with "listening in" to existing Twitterers, then leads you through posting your own comments, using the service to share information and ideas, enhancing your personal profile and finally looks at how Twitter can be used for business purposes.

As I mentioned earlier, it's a fast read and maybe - at times - some of the detail was skipped, which meant I was still unable to fully comprehend some of the aspects.  I realise though, that that's a personal thing.

But my interest was definitely stimulated, so I went on to add "Twitter Tips, Tricks and Tweets", by Paul McFedries to my collection.

This is a more traditional "how to" book.  It's very detailed, with clear step-by-step instructions and illustrations that helped me to begin to appreciated the concepts covered in "The Twitter Book".

The content is similar - how to get started, customising your profile, sending Twitter updates and following other Twitter users - but then goes much deeper into areas such as using Twitter on your mobile phone (which is less useful for UK users), searching for information on Twitter, displaying your Twitter feeds on other sites (I'll be trying that out on this blog) and becoming an advanced Twitter user by using the ever-growing range of tools and applications that extend Twitter's power and reach. And there are some really interesting ways to make Twitter a very powerful tool.

This book is marketed at both the novice and more experienced user.  Again - and refreshingly given the "hype" - the author writes, "If you hate Twitter or are simply mystified by the whole thing, I hope this book will show you that although Twitter isn't the life-changing event that some folks make it out to be, it is useful and entertaining if you use it in a way that suits you."

Based on these two books, I will certainly be taking more time to explore its potential as a corporate learning and development tool.

iPhone, therefore iWeb-conference

Having spent the last few weeks badgering the providers of rapid e-learning authoring tools to bring forward their plans to offer options to output content that can be played on a Blackberry, when offered an upgrade by my phone company the other week, I went for an iPhone!

So now I have a personal interest for looking for ways in which this device (albeit not a mainstream corporate mobile option in the UK at least) can be used to facilitate learning.

I was reminded that Webex has recently added the ability to take part in a web-conference from an iPhone, but not being a current user of this platform - and given the fact that competing Flash-based web-conferencing systems couldn't run on the non-Flash enabled iPhone - I was interested to find a solution that was designed specifically for the iPhone, complete with its own iPhone App.

Touch Meeting from web-conferencing provider, Persony, allows you to host or attend a web-conference from your iPhone (or a computer).  Two video clips show this in action.

It is possible to sign up for this service free of charge (but you are restricted to just three participants), although this would be OK for periodic small coaching sessions. 

The solution is US-based too, so at this point in time, for an international audience anyhow, I think this is just a great taste of what is possible.  Hopefully it won't be too long before other vendors develop their own solutions and if Apple ever moves to offer Flash on the iPhone, many other other major corporate web-conferencing provider will be able to bolt on this platform. 

Although I wouldn't see a need for a webinar to be delivered solely to an iPhone platform, on those occasions when a participant was travelling, they may rather attend from their iPhone (accepting some of the limitations posed by the size of the device), than miss the session altogether.

Virtual Training - Walking the Talk Online

Now it's rare for me to post a piece about a particular training provider, as the focus of this blog is on the tools you can use to deliver corporate learning and development solutions using learning technologies.

But today I learned about a particular provider, TMA World, whose newly promoted blended learning offer, via an informative video piece, provides a clear example of how we should be using webinars, together with e-learning modules and podcasts to deliver technology-driven blends.

Over the last four years, I've worked on similar programmes that delivered training in international leadership and teamworking using the same tools that a virtual/remote team would (or in some cases, should) use on a day-to-day basis. 

I've long felt that the best way to teach remote working skills is not with everyone in the same face-to-face classroom.  We need to take people out of their comfort zone and I've seen first hand how trainees learn from their first faltering web-conference session experience and build confidence over time to finally deliver a confident performance in the final programme webinar.

TMA are experts in their content field and I hope we can learn from how they are using web-conferencing alongside other media types to challenge any myths that remain that the virtual classroom cannot match a more traditional workshop.