I was lucky enough to grow up during the 1980s heyday of Choose Your Own Adventure stories, a low‐tech precursor to the electronic branching scenarios that are now common in modern eLearning, as well as the interactive fiction craze made possible by branching text editor Twine in the Int...
You, the learner, are the most important person in any learning or training experience. Not the teacher, not the textbook, not the technology. You.
According to learner‐centered instruction, the focus needs to be on what information you retain, the lasting insights you create, and the skills you...
In my work now, I’m often approached by subject matter experts who know they need some sort of training in place but who need guidance on the details of how to implement it. It becomes clear that they are envisioning something that looks a lot like a course in school, with long lecture presentat...
I am a big believer in RSS News Aggregators as a core technology for lifelong learning. By allowing each individual person to curate their own interests and get in the habit of consuming a steady stream of news relevant to their interests, RSS lets people build their own personalized diet of valua...
As we look at traditional education and try and explain how it got this way, one topic is so taboo that it rarely gets discussed. as much as we love and value our students, they can be a lit...
You can think of BitTorrent Sync as “Dropbox without the Cloud”. Not to be confused with the underlying technology of BitTorrent, this is a way of keeping a folder and files sync’d across mul...
One of the thrilling features of the Iron Man movies is the idea that Tony Stark can step into a mechanized robot suit and control it as if he were just moving his body naturally. The suit is expertly designed to understand his movements in real time and seamlessly amplify them to give him superhuma...
One challenge about creating reusable eLearning content is that designers often fall back into the banking model of education, creating a passive and dependent learning experience for students. This often looks like packaged PowerPoints or blocks of text readings that students are expected to cl...
When we ask “why offer Mozilla Open Badges in education?”, the answer often comes back “to motivate students”. When we ask “how exactly does that work?” – well, uh, it seems people have differing ideas.
I think that many people take it as an article of faith that giving badges will magically mot...
One of the most frustrating things about Professional Development (for both teachers and trainers) is that it’s difficult to get teachers together, and then the training happens, ends, and there is often too little follow up (on both sides).
I think part of the problem with this approach is the wa...