Find out what 15 of your colleagues have to say about learning at work at the second Working/Learning blog carnival, hosted this time by Manish Mohan.

Marvel (or not!) at the advanced special effects used in the 1927 silent movie How to Use the Dial Telephone. See more old training movies at the Internet Archive.

What generation are you? This test uses your social media habits to determine your generation. (I’m Generation Y trapped in a Boomer body.)

Learn absolutely nothing from the PowerPoint presentation Chicken Chicken Chicken.

How good is your ear for dialog? Find out with Dude or Droid, a simple drag-and-drop activity I created to try out Dragster.

As you decide who said each blurb, notice the cues that you’re responding to. What makes dialog sound natural, and what makes it sound stiff?

Click the image to start the activity, and pretend the “TRIAL” watermark isn’t there. Then come back here for some dialog tips and a mini-review of Dragster.

What did you notice about the dialog?

In the droid’s lines, you probably saw these symptoms of unnatural dialog: (more…)

Click the green arrow to help determine the next celebrity verb!

“I don’t have all 217 Jubumba Beanie Bops!” your child cries. “I only have 216! I have to have the last one! Just one more! Pleeease!!!”

Your child has been possessed by the Compulsive Completer, a beast that lives in all of us. From deep within our brains, it intones, “Must! Complete! Collection!” The closer we are to completion, the more insistent the demand.

You can harness the mighty force of the Completer to motivate your learners. Here’s one way to do it.

Consider offering a series of rewards throughout a course or other linear experience. Each reward builds on the last to create a desirable collection–all of it imaginary.

In a comment to Tom Kuhlmann’s post Motivate Your Learners with These 5 Simple Tips, Martin Kopsch describes the approach he took with home loan consultants: (more…)

A blog carnival gathers several bloggers together in one spot to discuss one idea. Dave Ferguson has organized the first Working/Learning carnival here. Here’s how Dave describes the posts:

• Michele Martin at The Bamboo Project shares strategies for supporting personal learning environments, nicely tying together the “work at learning” (you have to hone your craft) with “learning at work.”
• Cathy Moore at Making Change explains how to fit the entire world into a multiple choice question. How can you require the learner to think more deeply about on-the-job implications of the information at hand?
• Harold Jarche writes at his eponymous blog about learning at work, offering three easy steps to making sense out of the information that floods past you — as he says, moving from “this is an interesting idea” to “this is what I know.”
• Janet Clarey writes on her blog about working at learning. And she does mean working.
• …and my own contribution, SME? Not for Me, in which I ever so gently nudge people who design training, hoping to move them from subject-matter to practice.

Thanks for organizing this, Dave!

Can’t afford a full-fledged simulation? You can still recreate the learner’s world in your materials, even if your only tool is the lowly multiple-choice question.

Let’s say you’re writing materials for people who create custom pet hedgehogs using genetic engineering. You might be tempted to write a question like the one below.

It’s a good idea to include parrot genes in a custom hedgehog.

1. True
2. False (correct)

How could you make this question more realistically reflect the learner’s world?

First ask yourself, “Why does the learner need to know this fact?”

Then write a question that tests both the learner’s knowledge of the fact and their ability to apply it in the real world. “What if…” questions come in handy for this.

(more…)

When stakeholders think every detail is equally important, the result can be bloated elearning.

This hilarious YouTube video shows what I mean.

To fight the enemy, we have to see it

My favorite writing teacher used parody to help us recognize and remove bloat. Here’s a small example.

The following statement is sort of Apple style–minimal and direct. Your assignment is to rewrite it, packing in as many words and details as possible.

Don’t bring your cat to work, because some of your colleagues could be allergic.

Here’s one possible rewrite: (more…)

See examples of 10 multimedia approaches in USA Today’s Interactive Bag of Tricks (from Multimedia Learning). The short presentation includes many links to examples, and you can download a PDF with the key points.

A timely example for people in the US is the Candidate Match Game. Answer questions that gauge your opinion on key issues, and the candidates that most closely match your views rise above the others.

If you like the examples from USA Today, visit the elearning examples page in this blog to see several more from other producers.

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This slideshow is an attempt to help people make the best of a limiting design. Regular readers know that I’m no fan of the Next button. (Are you new here? Try Why you really want to be short or Visual menus: Structure with style).

Thanks to Erik Wallen–his comment on Is a course really the answer? inspired this slideshow.

What did I leave out? What are your favorite ways to liven up linear learning?

(You can download a PDF of the slide show here.)

Include social media in your learning: In his short, lively ebook on Learning 2.0, Jeff Cobb explains why we’re moving away from the teacher-centric approach and includes several examples showing how organizations are using social medial like podcasts.

Have your staff create and share mini job aids, says Michele Martin in this blog post. She recommends the use of Jing and similar easy, free screencasting services to create quick, casual aids.

Get inspired by learners’ Post-it® notes: Tom Kuhlmann points out that the job aids learners create for themselves can help you focus your elearning materials. A healthy discussion ensues in the comments.

Photo ©iStockphoto/peepo