Tag Archive

Education Facebook FAN PAGES Farmville Foursquare Future Geolocation Gina Schreck Google Gowalla IGNITE Innovation iPad Learning LinkedIn Mobile Technology Second Life Events Social Learning Social Media Social Media for Business Social Networking Technology Speaker Twitter Virtual Worlds Virtual Worlds Speaker YouTube

Posts Tagged: Social Learning

Session Notes & Links from ASTD (American Society for Training & Development)

Thank you to all the FABULOUS learners at ASTD’s international convention in Chicago. Here is a recap of my session with links and a few of my slides and side rants (thrown in for your entertainment value!).

The title of my session was, “Using Today’s Technology for the Game of Learning!”

If our goal is to engage learners and make learning fun again, it may be time to look for ways to take learning OUT of the classroom and put it into the hands (and devices) of the learners. Let’s get them involved in the process, from telling us what they need, to co-creating content for BIG FUN learning. In order to involve our learners, we have to be willing to step off of our thrown …or podium and remember that WE are smarter than ME!

These are the folks “FORMERLY KNOWN AS YOUR AUDIENCE”

Repeat after me, “I will not stand in front and read BORING powerpoint slides to my audience as if they were mindless idiots!” That mantra, repeated daily, will help you shift from standing up and dumping information to truly engaging the brains of the people in your audience. There are technology tools that can help engage, teach and even thrill your teams as they are learning …even outside the classroom walls BEFORE and AFTER a learning event!

WHY should you worry about changing the way training is delivered in your organization? Well part of it has to do with the fact that our learners have changed! We have 1-yr olds trading stock on e*trade for goodness sake. They are tech-savvy, impatient, have ADHD, and they have a lot to contribute! Here are some statistics:

We need to use some of the tools that are already in the pockets, purses and backpacks of our learners (and I’m not talking about bandaids, chewing gum or tweezers here!).

One of my favorite tools is the fabulous FLIP camera. Get creative and get others in the driver’s seat creating content! Involve customers, vendors, and of course employees! Some of the ideas shared included giving sales teams cameras and having them create a 5 minute learning video to teach the other teams about a new product roll-out. Have a few of your best customers create a short video showing a “Day in the life” of that customer to show your customer service teams what it is like in your customer’s world. Have executive teams or senior members of the organization share 3 things they know now that they wish they would have known when they first started in the industry or at your company. These learning videos can be loaded on your own website or on sites such as YouTube (set to private) or Blip, which allows you to load videos longer than 10 minutes.

Create podcasts within your organization (simple audio recordings saved as MP3 files). Interview team members and capture their knowledge to share with others. Download audio books and have them available on MP3 player for people to check out. And for those of you concerned about the risks and hazards of having these tech tools available to employees, LET IT GO! Reading your training manuals can give people paper cuts and looking at boring Powerpoint can cause brain damage so this is much safer and less expensive than those worker’s comp claims.

Here is a fun video that can provide SOME protection for Tech-Hazards (I showed an edited version of this in my program–this version is RATED PG-13) )

Remember, these are just a few ideas of how to get your learners involved using video and audio files, so be sure to post any of your great ideas in the comment section here so we can continue to share knowledge.

We discussed ways to take geo-tagging apps used for marketing or games such as FourSquare or GoWalla and create learning treasure hunt games. You could leave envelopes at different locations with blog posts or articles in them for learners to find using a geo-location list you give and their mobile devices. By adding the element of competition you will turn learning into a fun and fast-paced race to learn! This is very much like the popular geocaching game for treasure hunters, only the real treasure in your hunt is big nuggets of learning!

For another dimension of fun, you can use augmented reality tools such as LAYER or TAGWHAT to embed pieces of information or content from your learning programs into specific locations. By tagging the content to the location, you can send participants out on a hunt for information using mobile devices.

With barcode scanner apps on many of today’s mobile devices, look for ways to add 2-dimentional bar codes on objects that will provide more information to learners. You can place barcodes on walls within a building that bring the company’s story to life, or provide safety tips to learners. This picture shows a barcode placed on a tombstone that brings up information on the deceased. You can create your own content-loaded QR tag at http://QRtag.net – go ahead and try it–it’s FREE! I think I will be making a t-shirt with a tag on it that takes people to my website ) How can you use this?

With iPads, ipods, smart phones, Kindle readers, and more gadgets popping up daily, make a commitment to learn more about these new mobile learning tools, and do share your ideas here for the rest of us because WE are smarter than ME!

Be sure and check out the Gettin’ Geeky page on Facebook where I always share tech tips for BIG learning and building BIG biz. I encourage folks to post questions there or their own GREAT tech tips!

It was great meeting so many wonderful people this week at ASTD and I look forward to more BIG learning and BIG success stories!

@GinaSchreck
President & Digital Immigration Officer
Synapse 3Di

May 19, 2010 | Filed Under Education, Future, Geolocation, Social Learning, Technology | 8 Comments

Daily Time-Travel in Today’s School

Most kids put away their futuristic tools each morning and enter a time machine to go back to a past that is more and more unfamiliar and irrelevant to them. We call it school. They enter a classroom that looks much like the classrooms of yesteryear, to learn from teachers who are unfamiliar with the future tools or how they are used in the new digital landscape. Many parents of these same children avoid teaching them how to use the new tools out of fear, frustration and intimidation. Where will they go to prepare for their future? Who will lead them?

Wikis, blogs, Google docs, geo-tagging, social and mobile applications, are just a few of the tools that today’s kids use… outside the classroom. They find it odd that they’re told to look through old books for answers when Google has the latest information. They can’t talk with others in class about the answers to a test but as soon as they leave school they collaborate with a global team to solve more complex problems in a 3D immersive gaming environment.

Just do a Google search for “Layoffs in schools” to see that hundreds of thousands of teachers will lose their jobs this year and next. Sadly, many of the younger, tech-savvy teachers are first to go and many of the tenured teachers feel as is the digital divide has turned into a digital canyon that has them on the wrong side. These difficult times call for creative and radical solutions.

As Dorothy said, “We are not in Kansas anymore!” We have entered a new digital landscape that requires innovative thinking. We need to turn everything on its head to find creative solutions, such as reverse-mentoring, where students become the teacher, where teachers become coaches, applying tried wisdom to new problems. We need tools that blow the walls off of classrooms and take the students into environments that look more like the collaborative settings they enjoy when they leave school.

It’s time to ignite the desire for everyone to take action; to change what we know today as “school” and to become more innovative than ever before! We must seek new and creative ways to use more technology tools in our classrooms to prepare students for their future. We must all realize that he tools that built our past will not work to build our future. As learners, we must enter that time machine and go back to the future, where collaboration and teaming skills are critical.

If you had to start from scratch, what would you do different?

It’s about BIG learning! It’s about change. It’s about time!

@GinaSchreck

May 11, 2010 | Filed Under Education, Future, Social Learning, Technology | Leave a Comment

Watch Out for Kooks Talking About Technology & Change

There used to be a UFO club that had an office right in the strip mall near our house. It was the joke of the neighborhood. Who were these kooks that met in the small little office? Did you have to be a little crazy to even belong to this group?

We would tease the kids and warn them not to get too close as they looked in the windows, or they would be teleported to the mother ship. This UFO club was obviously never feared by locals, because after all, what could possibly happen in a strip mall? One day the office was just empty and had the FOR LEASE sign on the window again. Did they finally catch a ride back to their planet?

What if we could travel back 100 years and tell people living in 1910 that we have seen a man go to the moon, that we make video phone calls to people living on the other side of the world, and that every day we pay $4.50 for a cup of coffee that comes in a paper cup to our automobile window as we drive by? Surely they would call us kooks and even pull their children a bit closer warning them not to get near us!

Some of us feel the pain of the time traveler within our own organizations. When you have seen the future alive in other organizations, where they are using new tools and technologies to solve problems and connect people, you are sure that others will want to learn these new ways. But this is not always the case.

Organizations are very eager to talk about change and how they are focused on moving into the future but when you start trying to implement new tools and techniques, many times the old skeptics and critics come out of the rocks telling you why it’s safer to keep things as they were, at least for now. When trying to convince these curmudgeons, I suggest you start small.

Maybe for your next conference or all hands meeting you Skype in an expert from another company to share 3 top tips for your group. Get your sales and marketing team to shift just 15 minutes a day to connecting strategically on social media sites to begin building those networks. Use handheld video cameras to get your managers and executive team members to share 5 things they know now that they wish they knew when they first started and use that in new hire training. These are a few ideas to begin expanding the thinking of a crusty-thinking organization.

Don’t scare them by trying to do too many new things at once. Instead of trying to get your team to board the mother ship, perhaps you just invite them to meeting in strip mall–after all what could happen in a strip mall?

@GinaSchreck

April 15, 2010 | Filed Under Future, Marketing, Technology, Virtual Worlds | Leave a Comment

Using Productive Failure to Learn BIG

No more reading about “how to use today’s technology.” It’s time you try a little productive failure in order to start moving forward. Ok bare with me here as I go a little academic on you Remember, after all, I am first an educator and communicator with with a thin layer of Goofy Geekiness to help the learning go down. (Kind of like the sugar-coating over a valium– meant to keep you awake to learn something and then it will seep down into your brain as you sleep.) Hmmm I digress, but I see a new marketing slogan coming!

Back to productive failure. Michael J. Jacobson, Professor and Chair of Education at The University of Sydney, is an international expert in the fields of the Learning Sciences and Computer Supported Collaborative Learning. He is one of the top researchers exploring learning in the world of 3D virtual reality. Jacobson says students learn more if allowed to do something challenging where they will most likely have a hard time being successful. When they cannot do it, students are engaged and guided through ways to solve the problem. Sure it’s setting them up for failure, but it’s productive failure.

Recently I took a video-editing class at the Apple store, where I got my MAC, and realized that I had engaged in productive failure to make a huge leap in my learning. I had been playing with some editing tools on the MAC without really knowing what I was doing. I got frustrated when I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t able to find any of the movie clips I was loading. In the class, Rob, my instructor, guided me through a discovery process to find out that I needed to organize the clips differently. I GOT IT! I knew what he was talking about and immediately saw the application.

Back in time, we know that people learned new skills through aprenticship programs and learning on the job. But once education was institutionalized, that all changed. We now sit students (both kids and adults) in classrooms, put the sage on stage to feed them information and then give them a test to see if they remembered any of it. Sadly much of corporate learning is still done this way.

What we don’t know using this method is whether or not the student can actually DO the task or USE the skill learned. The student has head knowledge but doesn’t know how to apply the learning, and when they do go back and try to implement, they become frustrated and revert back to what is comfortable.

Now let me step out of the academic and into your world (unless your world is the academic world, then you can just stay in your seat). So many people are talking about ways to use technology in our businesses and in our learning environments. But most people attending the class are listening to the sage on stage and taking notes. Some are sitting on webinars watching screen shots. When the learner goes back, they don’t always remember how it was done and many get frustrated and quit. It’s time to dive in. It’s time to start doing and stop reading about it. What is one new technology tool that you keep reading about but haven’t yet taken a stab at?

Don’t worry about being perfect with it or having to set everything up perfectly before you start! Just start. Sure you may fail at parts of it, but when you do … fail productively!

If you want to see the outcome of one editing class, check out the latest Gettin’ Geeky episode! I would love to hear what you are going to attempt! Let us know here in the comment section. If you have questions on how to get started on it, let me know…Let’s Learn Together!

Gina

@GinaSchreck

March 9, 2010 | Filed Under Social Learning, Technology | Leave a Comment

Before You Give Up on LinkedIn Groups…

I have to admit, as a social media consultant and technology speaker, I have accounts on most of the sites, but I have used LinkedIn the least. I know, many of you LinkedIn lovers are going to have a field day on the comment section! As a business owner I have always thought of LinkedIn as today’s rolodex or having a brochure for your business online. Pretty static, except for the groups. Now I know for job seekers and those employed, it is a great tool to connect with recruiters and hiring organizations, but for most businesses you really have to get involved in, or better yet, CREATE YOUR OWN, group in your specific industry where you can share your expertise and learn from others.

LinkedIn Groups

I hear from people all the time complaining that the groups are spammy and there is no real value in them. First you must find the right group, and second, see if the group has any “ground rules” or policies about members not selling or spamming others. Third if there are no such rules and you can’t find a great group that shares info without spamming the members, CREATE ONE!

I have found a few key pieces of information that will help your group be found once you have it created:

Add keywords in the description of your group to increase your search rankings on LinkedIn’s search.
Add keywords in the title of the group to be found on Google.
Add your blog RSS feed to the group so new posts are shared with group members.
Send a weekly message that adds value for group members.
Be the host/hostess. Connect people in the group by making introductions to those who could potentially do business with one another.

If you are a speaker, trainer, or educator interested in joining a virtual community of peers and having fabulous programming that will help you build your speaking, training or coaching business check out our new LinkedIn Group or join our community page on Facebook and of course join us “in-world” on our SecondLife campus.

February 22, 2010 | Filed Under LinkedIn | Leave a Comment