Learn. Show. Repeat.

Tag: PLN

  • 100 Not Out

    cricket bat and ball

    In life, if someone reaches their 100th birthday it’s significant achievement. In cricket, to score 100 runs and still be batting is also a significant achievement. So when David Anderson announced the E-Learning Heroes Challenge #100, another significant milestone had been reached.

    The challenges started back in 2013 and from a modest beginning, with just a few people sharing their demos, the number of people participating has grown significantly over time (to date over 2,300 demos have been shared). When I first came across them, I must admit that I thought they were a bit silly. They weren’t whole courses and while the examples were good, there was no way that many of the designs shared would be appropriate in my workplace. Plus, I was busy and didn’t really have the time anyway.

    So I dismissed them without even trying to complete one myself.

    In 2014, David and Tom Kuhlmann presented at a workshop in Sydney and they kept talking about practicing in order to develop your skills and that these challenges were a good way to do that. So I thought I’d give it a try (Visual Storytelling with Photo Collages #27 was my first challenge) and I realised that I was missing the point and I soon discovered how the challenges can be beneficial to you and your career. After all, if you want to be great at something you need to make the time to practice no matter how busy you are.

    To celebrate 100 challenges, here are 100 reasons to give them a go:

    1. There’s a new one every week
    2. Participation isn’t compulsory
    3. Be inspired by other designers
    4. You can always complete older challenges
    5. Gives you a chance to practice
    6. Connect with other community members
    7. Demos only need to be a slide or two
    8. Showcase your skills
    9. Work free of the usual constraints
    10. You can suggest ideas for future challenges
    11. Develops your creativity
    12. Builds community
    13. Helps you run faster*
    14. Helps make you more visible in the eLearning space
    15. They’re fun!
    16. You can use PowerPoint to create your demo
    17. Helps to build your portfolio
    18. Get ideas from others
    19. Learn new skills
    20. Experiment with new ideas
    21. Cures baldness*
    22. Spend as much time developing a demo as you want
    23. Break old design habits
    24. Develops resourcefulness
    25. There’s no right or wrong way
    26. Give something back to the community
    27. You get to promote yourself
    28. Makes world peace possible*
    29. You can see how you’ve improved over time
    30. Develop friendships
    31. See how others interpret the same brief
    32. Try out new techniques
    33. You’re in control of the whole demo
    34. Helps you to lose weight*
    35. They can still be a work in progress
    36. There’s heaps of topics to choose from
    37. It’s free professional development
    38. You can make others happy
    39. Opens your mind to new possibilities
    40. Improves your IQ*
    41. There’s a recap each week of all entries submitted
    42. They only focus on a small part of a course
    43. You can test yourself against yourself
    44. Develops a show your work habit
    45. Proves that eLearning doesn’t have to be boring

     

    *Individual results may vary.

    Ok, I could only get to 45, so please help me get to 100 by adding to the list via the comments below.

    A big thanks to David for starting the challenges, growing them into what they’ve become and for positively supporting everyone who submits a demo. Well done also to everyone who has been brave enough to share their work in public as many more have benefitted from you doing this and from seeing just how many talented folks work in this field.

    To see a list of all the challenges, click here.

    Image source: Shutterstock

  • The Next OzLearn Tweet Chat is on 8/9/15

    OzLearn logo

    On Tuesday 8th September at 8:00pm AEST, @OzLearn is having its next monthly twitter chat. This month, our guest is Chief Learning Rebel, Shannon Tipton (@stipton) and we’ll be chatting about Twitter chats! You can view a post by Shannon by clicking here.

    To join the chat, go to Twitter at 8pm on 8/9, search for @OzLearn and join in the conversation (don’t forget to add #ozlearn to your tweets).

    There is also an OzLearn LinkedIn group where you can view the Storify of the chat afterwards.

    Hope you can join us for the chat!

  • Flipped Networking

    On the 17th and 18th of February, I attended and presented at the Ark Learning Assembly in Melbourne. Over the two days there were many interesting speakers talking about a range of topics including working out load, gamification, MOOCs , knowledge management as well as organisational case studies. For me though the hands down, without a doubt, best part was meeting people who up until the Assembly, I had only known online. One of these people, Vanessa North, who I knew through Twitter, summed it up best when she called it ‘Flipped Networking’. As she said, “you used to go to conferences, meet other people and then keep in touch (usually via e-mail). But now it’s the opposite, when you know people via Twitter and then go to a conference you feel like you already know them.”

    Learning Assembly

    I completely agree.

    While I haven’t been to a lot of conferences, the ones I did attend in my days before twitter usually consisted of a bit of chit-chat with the people sitting near me. But now, being actively connected with others means that I seek people out who I know will be there or they find me. Handshakes are often replaced by hugs and the conversations become an extension of the usual 140-character messages. With flipped networking, relationships are strengthened and deeper connections are formed.

    The same thing happened at the Third Place dinner between the conference days. There I met several more people face-to-face who had only been virtual connections up until that point. The only downside is that there wasn’t enough time to talk with everyone.

    Third place Melbourne meetup

    At the assembly we talked about the idea of the ‘new normal’, which was about how things are changing in the learning space. For me, that’s what flipped networking has become.

  • A New Beginning

    Welcome to my new site! It’s been quite a few weeks in the making and I’m happy to finally launch it.

    I started writing on the Learning Snippets blog about 18 months ago and over that time I’ve changed and evolved (actually, I still am) and as a result I wanted to update my site to reflect this. I wanted to do more with my blogging and sharing, so I decided that I needed a new space to achieve this goal. Getting to this point will be a post in itself in the not too distant future.

    About the same time as I started writing my blog I also started reading other blogs written by people in the learning field to see what they were talking about and to get a sense of what blog writing was about. As I read, it seemed to me that everyone seemed to know everything about everything! But over time, I found that the writers tended to have a ‘speciality’. Yes, they are across a range of aspects related to learning but they tend to have one area they are particularly passionate about that comes through. This was somewhat a relief because at first, I struggled with trying to know and be everything. I felt pulled in all directions and it wasn’t until I genuinely thought about what is it that I’m passionate about?

    It’s eLearning.

    There are a lot of opinions around about eLearning both for and against. There’s a place for all forms of learning whether it’s in the classroom, on a computer or mobile device, informal, social or whatever. The key is to use the approach that is fit for purpose and will achieve the best outcome. There’s also a bit of talk around about how we should drop the ‘e’ from eLearning or debating how to spell eLearning (e-Learning, E-Learning or E-learning) and my view is that if these were the biggest challenges facing eLearning as it is today, we would be in a pretty good place. However, these types of discussions are nothing more than a distraction from the real issue which is to develop courses that enable people to perform better.

    What we need to focus on is constantly improving the standard of eLearning courses and the experience of people who take them and to improve their performance. Many people complain that they don’t have time to complete eLearning courses and they view it as something that they have to do but why not make them so engaging, so useful and so good that people will want to take them? Why don’t we aim to raise the standard and skills of those who develop these courses? This is what we should be focusing on. It’s no easy task but is something that I will be doing more of. This will be my thing.

    As well as wanting a more modern and customisable site, the name: Learn. Show. Repeat. represents my new way of thinking. One of the strongest influences for me to date has been the practice of ‘Show Your Work’ which I first heard about via Jane Bozarth. It’s basically showing what you did and how you did it. I tried it a few times in the past which you can see here: Showing My Work #1, #2, #3, #4 and #5. It’s a terrific way to open up and pass knowledge to others who may need it.

    A few months ago, I started participating in David Anderson’s eLearning challenges as a way to develop my own eLearning skills and to interact with other designers. David has generously been helping me out with the showing part by storing my published Storyline demos on his server (thanks David!) and giving me a link which I can then share with others. But I wanted to be able to do this for myself so, along with registering a new domain name; I set up my own account with an external hosting provider and changed from a WordPress.com site to a WordPress.org site. Special mention to Helen Blunden and Jackie Van Nice who helped me out and provided some very handy advice with switching over to a self-hosted site. I also wanted to keep all of my demos in one place and accompany each entry with a blog post about how I created it. This was another reason to update the site.

    You’ll notice that there are more pages now – a Portfolio page that shows my eLearning challenge entries created with Articulate Storyline and a PLN page that lists some of the people, communities, blogs, websites and books that have helped me in my journey in the learning field. Like me the site will continue to evolve and change over time. You can also make contact with me directly if you need to.

    When I started writing on Learning Snippets, the tagline was: A diary of sorts about what I’m learning about learning and that’s still a big part of what I want to do. But I also want to do more showing and reflecting and sharing experiences with the aim of improving my skills and those of others too.

    I’m looking forward to the next phase of my learning journey; you’re most welcome to come along for the ride.