1. Social Learning
2. Social Networking Techniques
3. Gamification

eLearn Magazine’s Jane Bozarth and Karl Kapp both offer their insights.

“Social media tools help to amplify the social and informal learning already going on in organizations all the time, every day, and make the learning available on a much larger scale. They provide ways to connect talent pools and expertise in an organization or within a practice area, and can offer just-in-time solutions to problems and performance issues.”

Read the entire article at Mashable

I’m thrilled to be coming on board as Editor in Chief.  We’ve worked hard to identify ways of keeping the best of the last 10 years while looking for new areas of focus and ideas for reaching a broader community of readers. eLearning has evolved so much since 2001, from “CBT” and the early days of “distance education,” through virtual classrooms and virtual worlds to, now, the brave new frontier of handheld devices and mLearning, in an age with so much being created, shared, and curated through the new channels provided by social media.

The eLearn reader we hope to reach is  interested in and willing to use new technologies and approaches in creating, delivering, and supporting instruction (both academic and organizational) and workplace performance improvement.  This reader sees him- or herself as an educator or workplace learning practitioner interested in professional development, improving practice, and learning more about learning regardless of the vehicle.  He regards professional development and lifelong learning as an obligation for any practitioner in any field.  She is not a schoolmarm with a ruler.

eLearn will continue to publish content for the higher ed audience but will expand material for  those involved in workplace training, instructional design, and performance support.   We’ve already begun this journey with Cammy Bean’s wonderful  “Avoiding the Trap of Clicky-Clicky-Bling-Bling”, Aaron Silvers’ review of Thomas and Brown’s New Culture of Learning, and Tracy Parish’s reportage from Learning Solutions 2011.

We welcome reader submissions:

-Case Studies, particularly the “how I overcame…” and “how I successfully used…”  variety.  We’d love to showcase positive deviants and those accomplishing objectives despite the usual organizational constraints.

-Research. We are very interested in pieces from academia that focus on technology implementation and integration, learning and teaching strategies, instructor roles, learner experiences, facilitating online communities and social networks, etc. We are open to graduate student work, including reviews of (especially) current literature; one of my own frustrations as a grad student was that so much supervised work was graded and just shelved.  We would love to hear more from faculty at universities, particularly those with technology education, HRD, and workforce development programs, and encourage them to submit their own work or encourage submission of student work.  As so much literature is inaccessible to the non-university-affiliated practitioner, reworking or summaries of previously published research pieces will be considered for publication.

-Reviews of books or other publications, including something like highlighting a particularly strong and prolific blogger. 

-Reviews of conferences and other events.

Have an idea for an article or review? Please review our Writer’s Guidelines.

We also welcome feedback about what you’d like to see in the future. Please leave a comment below.

We hope you share our eagerness to enter a successful second decade of eLearn.

Best,
Jane Bozarth

1. Homepage
2. Best Practices
3. Stephen Downes’ ever-popular E-learning 2.0
4. Research and Case Studies
5. Tutorials (This category no longer exists as of 2011)
6. Keri Bjorklund’s eLearning Tools for English Composition: 30 New Media Tools and Web Sites for Writing Teachers
7. Michelle Everson’s 10 Things I’ve Learned About Teaching Online
8. eLearn Magazine’s Full Achive
9. Predictions for 2010

This list is only through December 27, and the rest of the year may bring surprises. Certainly the new year will bring surprises when we launch our redesigned site!

I interviewed Michelle about her new role and about her role as an online teacher:

Lisa: What are some topics you are considering for upcoming columns?

Michelle: I feel there is so much that is always on my mind that I could write about. Just off the top of my head now, I’d like to write more about time management issues for the online instructor, fostering active learning in the online course, and coming up with ways to create effective online assignments. I’m also very interested in how online teaching can inform teaching in the classroom, and vice versa, and I’m interest in how to best prepare faculty for teaching online.

Lisa: As one of eLearn Magazine’s most popular writers, what do you thinks makes your articles resonate with eLearn Magazine readers?

Michelle: This is a good question! It’s so flattering to me to see that several people have read the things I have written so far for eLearn Magazine. I’m not sure why my articles resonate with readers. I am very passionate about teaching online, and I hope that comes through in what I write. It’s important to me to create an online learning environment that is conducive to student learning. Because of this, I’m always reflecting on what I do and how I could do better, and I think a lot about advice I might give to new online instructors, or about advice I wish I had when I first started teaching online. Perhaps my articles resonate with others because they tend to wrestle with some of the same challenges I do.

Lisa: What is your favorite aspect of online teaching?

Michelle: I like that when I teach online, I get to learn a lot more about my students and how they think than I ever could in the classroom. In my classroom-based courses, students engage in a lot of small-group activity and discussion, but it’s impossible for me to hear the contents of each group discussion (let alone participate in all of those discussions), and I don’t always come away with a good sense of who is “getting it” and who is not. In the online environment, I can read through small-group discussions from start to finish, and I can see how these discussions evolve. I can also participate in each small-group discussion, and this is important to me because I feel the instructor should have a presence in the online course. I can see right away which students really understand the material and which students might need extra help, and I have the opportunity to reach out to the students who are having difficulties. I find I learn a lot about how students reason through different problems by reading through the thoughts they post, and I hope they are reflecting more deeply on the material since they have to write out their thoughts and post them in a public forum. I’ve actually ended up changing a lot of my activities and assignments based on what I’ve learned by reading through student discussions and seeing what some of their misconceptions about teaching are. I like that I get such a different perspective on students learning by witnessing what goes on in the online classroom.

Lisa: What is something interesting about you that you would like to share with readers?

Michelle: I live on a small hobby far about 60 miles north of the university I teach at. We have chickens, ducks, a goose, two dogs and several cats. I often think that if I weren’t teaching, I’d probably be a veterinarian because I love being around animals so much.

Watch for Michelle’s next column in January.

My educational and training background are rooted in journalism and English literature (in other words, reporting and critical thinking). I’ve come to learn enough about technology to be able to ask the right questions, speak to the right people, and read the informative resources — and that’s essentially how I gather information. I don’t do e-learning myself, but I still feel I am accepted among the community based on those other credentials.

When it comes to asking the right questions, from a journalistic mindset, sometimes you have to ask the “dumb” questions, the ones that probably have blatant and obvious answers. We’ve all heard, “There’s no such thing as a dumb question,” but then again, we’ve all poked fun of that adage, too, and for good reason. Some questions are pretty dumb.

If you are inside the circle of e-learning professionals, you are part of its linguistic community, meaning you have a vocabulary that you all agree upon and use for specific meanings within your field. For example, the word “student” might have a general meaning when used in conversation with a wider audience; but among e-learning professionals, using the word “student” rather than “learner” in fact carries a specific meaning. As an outsider to this linguistic community, I very often have to ask for clarification of words. And that’s where things can get dumb. On the one hand, I don’t want to take for granted the difference between “learner” and “student,” but on the other hand, it’s hard to know when, for example, “synchronous” simply means “synchronous.”

Every now and again, I ask a question that seems like it would be “dumb,” but it turns out to be a lucrative opening for much more interesting questions.

Recently, I’ve been talking to the members of a group called The Internet Time Alliance, five e-learning professionals who work together to not only serve clients, but also bat around ideas in the e-learning world in hopes of improving it.

It took a few dumb questions to start to understand what the group does. “What does the group do?” Answer: Discuss e-learning. “So are you like a writers’ circle? Do you collectively get together to discuss all your ideas, philosophically?” Answer: No, not like a writer’s circle. …
Then I asked Jay Cross, one of the founding members, somewhat tangentially, “By the way, where did the name Internet Time Alliance come from, and what does it mean?”
Excerpts from his reply:

You are the first to ask what Internet Time Alliance means!
The concept of Internet Time was born of Netscape’s accomplishing in a single year what would have taken at least seven years before the net came alive. Wikipedia puts it this way: Internet time was a common catchphrase that originated during the late-1990s Internet boom… People who worked with the Internet had come to believe that “everything moved faster on the ‘net,'” because the Internet made the dissemination of information far easier and cheaper. In layman’s terms, ‘Internet Time’ involves efficiencies inherent to digital transactions that are produced by the virtual reality of one product, one product type, or one service provided to consumers from one virtual cash register residing on one server. The amount of time required to conduct simultaneous transactions is reduced to irrelevance…
I have long believed that the pace of time is speeding up. (Can’t you feel it?) It’s not that the Cesium clock counts shorter seconds but rather that clock time is not the same as our experience of the time we live in. More happens in one of your minutes than in one of your grandfather’s hours.
We are in a period of extreme time deflation. …
The Alliance part of the name comes later” [see Working Smarter in Terra Nova under the subheading “Inside a Community of Practice” for more]

Knowing the origin of the group’s name opens up so many more questions about its mission and philosophy. It will inform other questions I ask them in the future about how they see the state of technology in relation to learning, training, and workplace environments. It makes me wonder what their assumptions are about people who are avid users of technology, and whether research findings before 2002 about learning are fundamentally not useful today.

Everyone can be a scientist – everyone can relate to nature, everyone can contribute to the scientific enterprise, even those who are shut away from nature.

The project may model how other prisons can provide useful skills and learning opportunities to inmates while helping scientists find reliable (long term, in some cases) research collaborators.
SOURCE: National Science Foundation http://bit.ly/c8QP0 via The World Future Society