Intro to e-Learning
I found this cool site that is actually all about e-learning and where you can find it, how its used, and what it consists of.
http://www.elearning.b2bmediaco.com/ is a site that really allows you to throw yourself into what e-Learning is. It has articles all over the place and updated news, a magazine, events, and a lot more. After I found the site just browsing the net for examples of what social networking and e-Learning is, I found the article called, “Today’s Water Cooler” on the site: http://www.elearning.b2bmediaco.com/issues/jun-july/junjuly08_todayswatercooler.html
It’s odd how i had never heard the term “informal learning” before our first day in class with Wayne, and then when I read this article, in the first sentence it mentioned it. Anyways, the article talks about how social networking has changed the way employees, and companies as a whole operate. What use to take place in conference rooms with bundles of employees, or in the break room, or the water cooler is now taking place electronically. Although a lot of companies struggle with the thought of social networking, and how much it may cost, and if they can do it with where their company stands. They mainly just want quick, easy, profit. And sometimes they are subtle, but they are still there. But, there are many good things other than profit that come with social networking in the company. You have a better chance at recruiting the best of the best, you are more likely to find that rare employee that throws down more effort than normal. There are many many things that can benefit a workplace with social networking.
This article has tons of examples, and really does a good job of explaining what e-Learning, and social networking is. Take a look at it for yourself. I hope this site allows all of you guys to find something interesting about this topic.
WEEK 2 RSS and Aggregators:
My experience with RSS feeds and aggregators has not been as great as I was hoping, although, i have been using them throughout several quarters now and i must say that my knowledge and understand on how they work is growing a good deal. So i have decided to keep up with them and see how it goes. I do like how you can literally gather any kind of information from the entire web, and place it all in one place. The things that i am still struggling to understand fully are the way RSS feeds work and update. Its just kind of confusing to log onto my aggregator, and all of the sudden see all thsi information that is new, and im not quite sure where its coming from, like which category are the new RSS feeds coming from. Im not really sure if this is making sense, but to me its really confusing sometimes when i see RSS feeds, and dont know which one they belong to on my aggregator. But i am willing to keep it going. Because i like how organized blogs are and having access to all the ones that i find on my aggregator is a really nice thing to have.
For this class i do see how it will help in the long run. I found 10 on all sorts of different interests that i personally have. A few that had a lot of good information are the following:
For my personal interests:
More for my future:
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2008/07/baristas-unite-social-networking-at-street-level.html
Here is a personal experience that coincides with your comments on the above linked articles. My company purchased a new software bundle for aerial photography. It’s pretty involved and has a bunch of features. The company selling it had online training for to software, instead of coming to the company to give a group workshop on it like in the past with older versions.
The site used is called http://www.gotomeeting.com and allows you to screen watch over web browser while conversing with VoIP through the site. Being able to take control of the instructors mouse or vice-versa and use the program while being given directions really let me focus on the features of the program I was interested in. It also made it easy to ask specific questions.
Other co-workers found this incredibly easy too. I believe this technique walks the line between informal and formal learning.
Chris,
I think it may work better to make each entry separate so we can respond to each article, although it would mean using the more standard Post into the full blog and not a new page, which can only have one continuous post as you are experiencing here. But it’s your call, I can handle it this way also!
Concerning the e-learning article for week 1, I thought the elearnmagazine was a pretty solid information source. I liked the variety of articles and writers which really allowed the magazine approach to be alive and valid. I read the water cooler article as well as the Web 2.0 article and both had good content and updated ideas.
Roche’s article about corporate e-learning had some interesting quotes: “The convergence of search, streaming and downloadable video, granular content access, Web 2.0 technologies and online community interaction is placing tremendous pressure on the enterprise to respond,” says Tom Kelly, former vice president of Internet Learning Solutions at Cisco Systems. This is a potent statement and convergence a great action and metaphor to describe what is available to us with these new technologies. I would add that I wish schools were as interested as corporations – or could at least get past the tradition lock an open up the process in classrooms.
Then Cocheu states that “the resource challenges brought on by economic tough times, training professionals are discovering that social networking tools have become the most costeffective means of enabling their organizations to continue providing the training and knowledge transfer that team members require to perform their jobs at the highest levels”. The recognition that social networking is “cost-effective” is an eye opener in that most companies compain that the cost of organizing and managing this process is high – and it often is when it is overly scientific and when company’
s purchase expensive “social networking” applications designed for the enterprise, rather than take advantage of the popular and very successful open source blogs, wikis, aggregators, and conferencing applications in the Web 2.0 tradition.
Then the statement that “all these tools provide great opportunities for companies to save huge amounts of time and energy. Companies can reduce e-mail by 70 percent with wikis, for instance, and accelerate project times by 30 to 40 percent.” This would be an interesting goal in our classes – making studies more effecient and time saving! Woudl be nice.
I just got your comment, and what I will do, is go ahead and place what I have written so far and put each of them into separate posts on the main blog. That way you can comment on them individually. I think I will go ahead and keep posting everything both on here, and on the main blog, that way I personally can just click on my e-Learning page to see everything that I have done for this particular class, yet leave the posts for you guys to comment on in the main blog. Thanks again for the comment WB, I appreciate it a lot!!! And I am very glad to hear that you enjoyed what I had to offer.
By the way, I re-read those particular parts that you talked about, and those percentages they used are pretty astounding. It made me think about before when everyone thought e-mail was the greatest thing, and now, wikis may be the replacement, well have to see!!