The Learning Strategist

Recently, someone from Bloomfire contacted me over LinkedIn and requested me to give answers to some questions. I have been late to respond but thought they were pertinent given the way things have changed in the training world. So let me answer them for myself anyway before I send them to Bloomfire. From your perspective, what are some of the challenges in writing curricula that resonate with the learner? The main challenge I see is Knowing your audience precisely. Knowing your audience helps you scope out the training accurately and achieve the right level of detail. It will be the key to any kind of task you want to do; build a product, create a game, or plan training content. How might these challenges differ from the challenges of yesterday? I believe the challenges of yesterday were more than the challenges of today. The intervention of Web 2.0 and the increasing tech-savvyness of the learner have made information immediately accessible to one and all. Today, most informatio...

Tony Karrer is organizing a session on elearning on May 21st between 9 AM to noon pacific time. He is looking for people to present examples of practical solutions to common problems to leading edge solutions. Some example areas that he quotes: Self-Paced Courses Performance Support Tools Mobile Learning Collaborative Learning Social / Network Learning 3D Learning Games Toolkits Interesting Tools If you are interested, please send me an email ( akarrer@techempower.com ) with: A brief description A couple of example screen shots He is expecting to have more examples than we can show and discuss in the 3 hours and will try to choose a variety of different examples that represent effective patterns .

This month's Big Question question is Workplace Learning in 10 years? A very pertinent question to ask in such times, as we hear of more and more failure rates in formal and push learning. Most of our generation have learned this way, and some like me have always found such learning boring from the very beginning. My parents, would force me to learn the way the other 'good' kids learned, and I would resist and prefer to stay in my own dreamworld, that I found more fascinating than my study books. Fortunately for me, every year before the final exam my mom would hound me into preparing for the exams and I would come out scoring reasonably well. Now I can owe my 'decent' job to all the 'push' I got from my parents. But given a chance, I would not like to go back to studying the way I did in school, though I owe my 'formal' degrees to the 'formal' learning I received. But I did have some pretty good teachers. My Geography teacher had a unique s...