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White-Boardom, a Litmus Test for Virtual Classrooms – Part 2

2nd September 2010

Trainers can be wonderfully inventive when it comes to designing activities, but awfully inhibited when it comes to transferring them online. In yesterday’s blog I promised to share a number of whiteboards with you. Those I created for a variety of different teaching and training strategies. Today I shall continue the theme with some other examples. [...]

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White-Boardom, a Litmus Test for Virtual Classrooms

1st September 2010

There are only three questions I want to ask when I’m thinking about a virtual classroom system: Is it easy to use? How does it perform? What can I do with it? In the past few months I’ve been using a range of different tools which include Adobe Connect, DimDim, Elluminate, Saba-Centra and WebEx. As [...]

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Keep a lookout for the Troll

24th August 2010

As the poet said, “What is this life if full of care, we have no time to stop and stare?” So rather than fill my blog spot this week with some worthy words about the psychology of motivation to learn, I’d like to share with you instead these words I wrote a few months ago [...]

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You’ve Either Got, or You Haven’t Got Style

18th August 2010

I’ve always known I was a truly great writer. All I lacked was a little public recognition, maybe a Whitbread prize, or The Booker. So when my good pal Barry sent me the link, he knew I’d be unable to resist. Jane Austen? Charles Dickens? James Joyce? Which great writer would be revealed as my [...]

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Strategies for learning and performance support 4: exploration

13th August 2010

In this, the fourth in a series of four posts, we manage the seemingly impossible – we both break the mould and then find we have come full circle. The former is true because exploration, the fourth strategy, is by far the most learner-centred and the only strategy that concentrates on ‘pull’ rather than ‘push’ [...]

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SHAPE – invisible body language

11th August 2010

It seems on the surface that body language has little relevance in a situation where your body is unseen, for example in an online meeting, regardless of whether or not you use video. However body control is very important. Your posture affects how you feel as well as how you sound. Here are some rules [...]

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Strategies for learning and performance support 3: guided discovery

6th August 2010

So far in this mini-series of posts we have looked at two very teacher/trainer-centred strategies: firstly exposition, which is the straightforward delivery of information from the teacher/trainer/expert to the learner; and then instruction, a more deliberate process based on very specific learning objectives, which by necessity includes carefully structured interaction and assessment. The third strategy, [...]

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Strategies for learning and performance support 2: instruction

30th July 2010

In last week’s post I looked at the simple strategy of exposition. You will recall that this involved little more than the delivery of information from teacher or expert to the learner, perhaps with a little Q&A and discussion, but largely one-way. Exposition occurs live through lectures, presentations and webinars, but can also be packaged [...]

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Working with the iPad

26th July 2010

It’s now two months since the iPad was launched in the UK, and so it’s timely that people are starting to comment on how they and others are using it. Inspired by these and other posts I thought I would jot down my own thoughts on how the iPad fits into my toolset. The first [...]

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Some kind of consultation on the future of skills has been launched

25th July 2010

———————————————————————— Department for Business, Innovation and Skills – 22 Jul 2010 10:10 Consultation on future of skills launched ———————————————————————— Skills Minister John Hayes has recently invited employers, individuals, colleges and training organisations to share their ideas on how they would like skills policy to be set out in the future. However, you may not be regarded as a [...]

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