Mashed Articles

The BCS has filmed a series of videos on e-learning videos with the following panel:

- Clive Shepherd, Chair of the e-Learning Network
- Samantha Kinstrey, MD of 2e2 Training
- Laura Overton, MD of Towards Maturity
- Lars Hyland, Director of Learning Services at Brightwave
- Jooli Atkins of Matrix FortyTwo and Chair of the BCS Information and Technology Training Specialist Group.

The panel feedback on topics like saving money through e-learning, is classroom training finished?, which learning technologies can help and how to get the learning blend right.

As interesting as these videos might be, I’m not a fan of producing video debates and just sticking them up online. There’s no option to comment on these videos, no transcript for both accessibility and learning purposes, and as a learner, I was left with no sense of connection with the debate or the BCS. It’s very much a broadcast of e-learning opinions that doesn’t actually use any of the good advice given in the videos.

Have a peep at video 3 where Clive Shepherd very clearly states that he views Twitter as a communication tool, rather than a learning tool. It’s not to say that Twitter can’t help learning – but he’s quite right in saying there are tools better suited to it.

Other debates in this series are:

IT’s help in the Credit Crunch
Data Security and public confidence
IT policies and your green credentials
Solving the IT skills supply and demand cycle

Donald Clark will be speaking about Weapons of Mass Collaboration at Learning Pool’s Public Sector Learning Conference on 20th May. He sees WMC as a big opportunity and quick win for public sector organisations.

Donald’s talk has its roots in the fact that local authority spending on training per annum is over £500m and two thirds of this spend is duplicated (Audit Commission statistics).

So there’s opportunity for savings through collaboration. And I’d imagine those savings aren’t just fiscal – joint content creation and commissioning will save time. And there’s always the hard-to-measure advantages of collaboration – I always find that in well-managed collaboration, creativity, innovation, engagement and learning increase.

To find out what Donald thinks are the Weapons that enable Mass Collaboration you’ll have to catch the talk or podcast. I’m a huge fan of Donald’s blog and twitter stream, so it’ll be great to see him in the flesh.

Other speakers at Public Sector Learning Conference include:

Ben Page, MD, Ipos MORI
Major Roy Evans, British Army
Charles Jennings, Duntroon Associates
Henry Stewart, Chief Executive, Happy Computers

I’ll be attending too to give a class on creative content creation – more on that later.

Get more information here or call 0207 101 9383.

Dublin Institute of Technology host an MSc in Applied eLearning. It’s a part-time, blended delivery programme over 2 years.

The programme modules include:

- Learning Theories
- Instructional Design and eAuthoring
- Research Methods
- eLearning Project Module
- Supporting Virtual Communities
- Trends in eLearning Technologies
- Academic Enterprise, Strategic
- Project and Change Management of eLearning

The design and development of an ePortfolio is cited as being critical to the programme learning outcomes.

You can get more info from the website: http://learningandteaching.dit.ie/html/msc/index.html or by emailing roisin.donnelly@dit.ie