TLG events in Sydney

Hello again TLG seminar enthusiasts!

As always, thank you to everyone who was able to make it to the seminar last Wednesday - TLG is really excited to be working with this new e-learning approach, and we are equally excited by the enthusiastic response we have already received from people who attended the seminar.

A very special thanks to Angelique from BT Financial Group. It was great how positive her comments were about ThinkBreaks - and yes, believe it or not, she wasn’t paid to speak so positively about them! If you were interested in getting in touch with Angelique in regards to her ThinkBreak experiences let us know - she said she is happy to hear from people.

If you would like a copy of the slides from the presentation, please let me know, I am happy to forward them to you - they’re quite large, about 13Mgs.

So a ThinkBreak… what is it again?

Basically, we define it as a small, sustainable and most importantly - trackable, piece of learning that is ‘pushed’ to your employees. A ThinkBreak can be used as part of a sustained learning ‘campaign’ that is sent to your employees - it’s an exciting new form of easily administered learning that actually makes learning stick in your employees minds.

The premise behind ThinkBreaks effectiveness is simple - your employees are time poor, have shorter attention spans, and remember less and less as time goes on after a training piece (Remember Will’s favourite graph - for some further reading on this, be sure to read the “Reinforcing Results” article below).

So, in recent times, there has been a growing concern that traditional training no longer works. Without debating the meaning of what ‘traditional’ training is (because as we found out, this can be a topic all in itself!) let’s assume it refers to large pieces of training, delivered all in one go, either to an audience or individual, with an assessment to test their understanding. If we assume this is traditional training, then we invariably see learners take the training, do the assessment, and then forget it. It is here that the ThinkBreak theory of training steps in.

ThinkBreaks aim to hit your learners with short, sharp and engaging pieces of learning on a regular basis in an effort to increase learner retention and drive home important messages. Used as part of a learning ‘campaign’ ThinkBreaks become perfect refresher pieces to hold all of your larger learning pieces together.

Cathy suggested a few articles you can look at - both discuss learner retention and the effect blended learning and smaller learning is having on the organisational training world;

Nano-Learning: Miniaturization of Design
Blended Learning: Reinforcing Results

Please do not hesitate to get in touch with The Learning Group if you wanted to know more about ThinkBreaks and how we are using them.

Thank you once again - I hope everyone was able to take some valuable ideas away from the presentation. We’d love it if you would like to get in touch with us here, you can email Cathy, Will or myself - catherine.aboud@learngroup.com.au , william.gill@learngroup.com.au or daniel.wright@learngroup.com.au or you can contact any of us at 02 9269 8000.

Hope we see you all again soon!

Dan

Hello all,

Thank you once again to everyone who attended our seminar on Friday morning - as promised we’ve prepared a few links and materials (including the presentation slides) from the seminar.

You may have noticed we’ve prepared this follow up material in a blog… what a coincidence! It took me no longer than a couple of minutes to create this blog (for free) after the seminar on Friday, which I think reinforces the points we made about the simplicity of creating content in many Web 2.0 technologies.

We’d love to see a few comments posted about our seminar on this thread – so if everyone could leave us a comment or a message, it would be very much appreciated! Maybe some thoughts on how you think this technology can be used as learning in your organisation, or issues you think are acting as barriers to using wiki’s and blogs as learning. With a bit of discussion on this thread, we may even learn something…

A lot of what we covered in the seminar on Friday involved the definition and current use of Web 2.0 technologies, and the exciting opportunities they are creating in collaborative learning within organisations. Remembering that these are not new technologies, but a new way of using and viewing them, raises many interesting and innovative opportunities for the learning & development industry. They also provide fantastic tools to use in conjunction with e and blended learning solutions, and facilitate many of the desired learning outcomes of e-learning courses.

Wiki’s and blogs especially facilitate discussion and knowledge sharing between users. Already organisations are utilising these tools internally to create effective learning on corporate culture, processes and policy exposure.

The learning opportunities that can be created through these technologies are limited only by your imagination. Be sure to look at the links below, create your own blogs, edit some wiki’s, subscribe to some podcasts - you’ll be surprised at how easy it is to set up and use once you’re in there…

Links:
www.wikipedia.org - The largest wiki on the net. Effectively an online encyclopedia that is completely authored by regular users of the site - try it out, you can add or update any page on any topic you can think of.
www.socialtext.com - A large corporate wiki. 1000’s of organisations use this wiki as a collaborative tool.
www.linkedin.com - A professional social networking service. Create a profile and network with current and previous colleagues and work peers. This is a great way of extending a professional occupation network and is very easy to set up and use.
www.blogger.com - The blog web-site that I used to create this blog.
http://del.icio.us/ - A social bookmarking service. Allows you to bookmark your favourite sites and share them with others in your network.
www.abc.net.au - The ABC website has some great podcasts you can subscribe to - check them out!

And a link to Tony Karrer’s e-learning blog that Anette highly recommends: http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/

The slides from the seminar can be found here.

Some Links…

• The Learning Group
• Tony Karrer’s e-learning blog
• The eLearning Guild

Thank you again to everyone who attended - I hope these materials and links help you in your exploration of these great tools. As always, feel free to get in touch with us here at The Learning Group if you have any questions about the seminar, want some more info or need some help with your e-learning concerns.

See you next time!

Dan
Anette.Karlsson@learngroup.com.au
Daniel.Wright@learngroup.com.au
William.Gill@learngroup.com.au