e-learn2work

Is this the sign of things to come?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 01 May 2007 14:23:00 +0000

Just had this passed to me by Richard in our office. It seems there have been some successes on early prototypes of games that can be controlled by brainwaves. This is really cool and one could imagine all the different uses for such a technology, not just for gaming, but for accessibility issues and training scenarios. I can see it now, lifelike simulations that pick up thought patterns and decision making directly from your brain waves...there'll be no room for cheating though!
See the full story here

Free online videos tutorials and how - tos

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 14:21:00 +0000

As you know e-learning can take many forms and a really popular and emerging format for collaborative learning is the online video. There are many sites where you can upload and view videos, but I've found this new site where the videos are all about sharing learning and how to do stuff. All of the videos are free and anyone can contribute by uploading their videos. There are musicians with videos of how to play a song; chefs with videos of their recipes, media buffs that show you how to use Photoshop to enhance your photos; videos on how to set up a wireless network etc. In fact there are many categories, so, if you are a visual learner and are wanting to learn something new, why not see if it is featured on this site? And if it isn't yet featured, when you do learn how to do whatever it is, why not make your own video and share your knowledge with other people on the planet. (you can also put a link to your company website, so its actually a good way of getting yourself "out there") The link is: http://www.sutree.com/
Right I'm off to learn how to airbrush all the wrinkles from my photos - neat!

How great is this? Part II

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 11:39:00 +0000

Rich in our office found this on YouTube...talk about interactive!
If you want to know more about how this project was developed, click here

Ask the Audience

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 14:05:00 +0000

How many times have you sat in a classroom and been too embarrassed to ask a question, or even answer one for that matter, for fear of getting it wrong? How do teachers know which learners understand and which don't? The latest classroom technology involves learners using voting units to capture feedback onto an interactive whiteboard in the form of graphs - a bit like "Who wants to be a millionaire" What the system also can do however is capture individual learner responses which are private for the teacher alone to review and store. I am currently involved in a pilot with some young learners using this technology and we are going to monitor the effectiveness of the solution. If anyone has any innovative ways of using this system that we can try I would be keen to hear them. Again, a case study will be compiled and disseminated later on this year. It's not just for the classroom either, it can be a powerful tool in meetings and seminars.
Web links: voting units
Interactive whiteboards

Video Diary Booths

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 13:32:00 +0000

I've just been asked to help a company engage young people using innovative technology. These learners are building apprentices and someone came up with the excellent idea of creating a "Big Brother" style diary room where learners could state their views and thoughts and these would be captured and used to engage others involved in similar courses. Coupled with using iPods to playback the videos this could be a very useful approach. I did a bit of research and there are some companies out there that have booths that you can hire from around £300 a day. This often includes the editing and upload to a website or production of resulting films on a DVD (apparently theres a big market for these at weddings) You can also purchase your own for a whopping 10K. However, being a small company who wanted a mobile solution that could be carried even to their learning sites abroad, we decided to think outside the box and came up with a tent structure which can be customised and set up in many different ways. You can even buy soundproofing material on a roll....so a true Blue Peter solution. But who said that you have to be high end to achieve the results you are after. I will be doing a detailed case study and charting the distance travelled so I will update you soon. Until then, check out these web links:
http://www.thevideobooth.co.uk/
http://www.video-booth.com/
http://i-vox.co.uk/?gclid=CL2Gr4vij4oCFQzBXgodZRZKhA
If you want to know more about our custom solution get in touch with me.

Social Bookmarking - eh?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 16:16:00 +0000

OK so you may have heard of this already. However, although I have heard it "bandied about" as they say in Yorkshire, I've never really understood what it meant....its a bit like the term WEB 2.0 everyone seems to talk about it but no-one admits to not really knowing what it means....watch this space for that one. So social bookmarking and Del.icio.us let us explore what it can do for us at elearn2work.

Social bookmarking is a way of sharing knowledge and information that could be useful for everyone who likes the things we like. The idea is that you use del.icio.us to bookmark pages of interest to you, then you "tag" them, ie give them key word descriptions that allow other people to find them. The beauty is that del.icio.us stores your bookmarks for you so that you can access them anywhere. This becomes really useful when you have a group of like-minded people, a bit like us at el2w, that are all interested in the same sort of info. Lets get down to the nitty gritty: We are all interested in all things elearning right? So we log into http://del.icio.us/elearn2work using the login: elearn2work and password: el2wsa then we can set our browser up with the del.icio.us button(they show you how when you first log in) Now any time you come across an article, journal or site to do with the project or elearning you can click the del.icio.us button and it will be saved. Pretty soon we should have a pool of elearning links and bookmarks.
Why not set up a del.icio.us account for your organisation? Get your staff to add any bookmarks that are pertinent to your area of interest...a great tool for informal learning and collaboration.
To make things easy I have put a link to del.icio.us in the side bar.

PebblePad e-portfolio tool

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 13:35:00 +0000

Went to a demonstration of this tool at the Educa online conference in Berlin last week.

I was very impressed with this tool; particularly useful for capturing informal learning by the learner. pebblePad is a learner-centred fully portable e-portfolio tool for life that is very easy to set up and use.
Once an account is created, any number of assets such as achievements, targets, experiences can be logged by the user. The learner can create a web page with links to particular achievements and experiences. Anything that is recorded or uploaded into pebblePad can be shared with named people. These people can be given different levels of access to the assets within the e-portfolio.
Coming soon is a new interface that will appeal more to younger learners and get them engaged in learning how to organise their lives online.

If you attended the online educa conference in Berlin this year, view and contribute to the webfolio created in pebblepad

Coming Soon The Elearn2work Framework tool

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 14:21:00 +0000

Sorry I haven't posted all week but we've been beavering away at putting together a kind of audit tool for all you small businesses out there to use. The plan is that it will contain some diagnostics to assess your requirements and then give you a number of options for content development, delivery methodolgy and delivery hardware. There will be reviews, case studies and step by step instructions to help you make the best choice for your business. I'll post the link to it as soon as it is completed, but just thought I'd give you something to look forward to. :-)

The Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 09:54:00 +0000

At the conference, I got the chance to have a play with a number of devices and I was really impressed with this:

Microsoft have got together with a number of partners to bring you their latest baby sometimes referred to as the Origami or Q1 UMPC. It has a 7" screen which can be attached to an equally small but usable keyboard; it can be used as a wireless tablet PC with its touch screen and stylus (what really amazed me was that you can scribble onto the screen and it renders it digitally and even formats it for you) ; It even has a text type interface that you can thumb type in much the same way as you do when texting. You can access the web, watch movies, flash e-learning modules, listen to music, access email, download news feeds, make free calls using voice over IP, prepare presentations and do pretty much anything that your laptop/pda/iPod/Desktop PC can do! It even has GPS and bluetooth. Will it kill off the ipod? I don't think so, its not exactly pocket size, but it does fit nicely into a brief case or handbag and is so versatile, if I was going to buy a new PC for myself, this would be my choice at around £799.00.
The main thing that struck me was, how useful would this be for the small business? Compact, versatile and full of features, something that your staff could take home on an evening to do their training perhaps. Let me know what you think.

Handheld Learning 2006

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 08:10:00 +0000

Just returned from the Handheld learning conference 2006 in London. The conference was generally aimed at schools, but there was still a lot to be learned from the many vendors of handheld devices and even some of the pilot applications in schools.
Over the next few weeks I will be showcasing some of the items and applications I tried out and also putting some useful links up here...just need some time to wade through all of the papers that I collected.

How great is this?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 13:47:00 +0000

Paul in our office sent me this You tube video which I thought was amazing. Not sure where it would be used in the scope of this project but thought it would entertain you all in the absence of any other posts.

You can find out more by reading this article:

Interactive text messaging revisited

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 13:27:00 +0000

The long awaited meeting with Mark Cody of 02 took place this week. I was hoping to find some new and innovative way of closing the loop on training courses that were delivered outside the bounds of a Learning Management System. As we have been looking at new ways of delivering content ie such as via an iPod, how could we be sure that the material had been watched and understood? Inside a Learning Management System, you would be given a test which would capture and store your results.

Using Interactive messaging you can send messages and quizzes to anyone who owns a mobile. They can be asked a number of multiple choice questions and their answers could be easily texted back directly into a database. Excellent for uses in compliance training to register the fact that they have received and understood the message.

This technology could also be used for reminders, snap surveys and opinion polls as well as marketing and customer service uses. Anyone who has called the AA after breaking down will know that while you wait in your car they send you a text containing the name, company and registration number of the vehicle that will come to your rescue, together with the estimated time of arrival. A really good tool for enhancing the customer experience methinks.

We are currently looking at setting up a pilot to explore its uses in e-learning; so if you are based in Yorkshire and Humberside and employ under 50 people, contact us we may be able to help you

PSP additions

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 13:12:00 +0000

Ok so I know that I've harped on about the joys of iPods and podcasting when used for training. I haven't really touched on the use of other gaming consoles like the nintendo DS and PSP. Well, I haven't really looked into the DS yet, but I have it on good authority that it could be used as a training device, I just need to figure out how you get stuff onto it. The PSP however, I have had considerable success with. (special thanks to Bomski in our office who has been invaluable when I needed help with video creations and conversion) I have managed to load training videos onto it, powerpoint presentations and I have accessed web pages and pocasts from it. It also has a larger screen that the iPod, and small speakers. Plus you can pick them up for a very reasonable £130! You do need to convert any video into the relevant mp4 format (there are different mp4 formats for different devices) but this is not difficult to do. But what has got my mind racing is this:

This little eyeToy camera is coming soon as an add-on for the PSP together with VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol - basically allows you to make voice calls over the web - heard of Skype?) Imagine if you can access the web, you can use Skype or an instant messaging service to talk in real time with your tutor and actually see them too! How cool is that?

3D TV on the horizon?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 13:01:00 +0000

Was reading an article on bbc.co.uk which states that 3D TV could be with us pretty soon. How does that relate to e-learning you may ask. Well I know it seems pretty pie in the sky at the moment, but imagine the possibilities particularly for real-life training simulations. Imagine hospital staff being shown by 3D images how to lift a patient correctly or administer drugs to the correct area of the body. Or a machinist being shown how to clean down a machine safely. There are many applications where 2D just isnt rich enough and where face to face was really the only way forward.

At the meeting I went to at the Learning Light, the speaker demonstrated a handheld device that when pointed at a piece of paper on the table, it showed a screen with a 3d man walking across it and by walking around the piece of paper, you could see the man from all the different angles. It was very clever and I couldn't help thinking that one day soon, in much the same way as my kids marvel at stories of my first telly, my grandchildren will listen in awe as I tell them that I held one of the first devices that conveyed holographic images.

X-Men or elearning?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 10:39:00 +0000

We had a meeting with some of our UK and transnational partners and took the opportunity to show them some of the new technologies that we are currently researching. Pictured below is Rod Knox CEO of Virtual College, wearing the latest in video and 3D Glasses.

We were able to project e-learning modules from an iPod into these and are looking into developing some training simulations to run in them.

Also below is Me (Abby Dacres) with Lukasz Arendt one of elearn2work's transnational partners, Theresa Williams, Project Manager UK & transnational and Dan Jordan Senior Technical Developer Virtual College.

Ok so it does look a little unconventional, but the elearning experience is pretty cool. I can't see your average person sitting on a train with their ipod just yet, but a lot of businesses do employ youngsters and what better way to engage them..these glasses can be used with gaming consoles as well as computers and many hand held devices. Perhaps they could be loaned out on the proviso that the training be completed. The learner could then be tested via a Learning Management System to close the loop on the training experience. You saw it here first!

Learning Light Event

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 14:52:00 +0000

Attended a talk by Ron Edwards - Ambient Performance at the Learning light event last night. The talk was around using new technologies to deliver learning. There was a lot of buzz around using iPods and PSPs, I am pleased to say. There were a lot of devices and software solutions that I hadn't considered,such a sonline gaming, so I will be looking into those. Also some of the stuff we had been doing surrounding the use of GeoVid was new to the speaker and other experts in the room; so I felt quite proud that we too, were at the cutting edge when developing new ways of delivering content. Much information was shared, which is what these meetings are all about so I felt that it was a great success. Ron Edwards has an excellent blog; I have placed a link to it in the side bar. Go check it out and keep yourself in the elearning "know".

More training onto iPod

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 09:37:00 +0000

Had a problem a week or so ago where I wasn't able to get our Flash training modules onto iPod or PSP because of the way that they were created. Well I did a bit of lateral thinking and came up with using some screen capture software to run through the training module. All I had to do then was convert the resulting avi movie to MP4 and I was able to load into iTunes and the PSP software (cant remember what they call it)and subsequently onto the iPod and PSP. The quality was fine except that the mike on my laptop picked up sound from me moving my hands over the keyboard. Perhaps I can set it up so that it only records the audio from the training material and not external input. (Although how useful would that be? being able to narrate whilst you show someone how to access software or use the internet...you could develop a training video very quickly and cheaply for people to play later.
OOh sorry I forgot to tell you the software I used: Snagit8 and ImToo both are available for a free trial download...give it a go and see what you can do!

Another use for RSS?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 08:47:00 +0000

Sorry to digress again but I got an email from a marketing guy I had spoken to on a forum weeks ago about RSS. He sent me a report that detailed how RSS worked (which I now didn't really need, but I thought I'd give it a read in case there was some aspect that I hadn't grasped.) There was one aspect which I hadn't considered as I was concentrating on using RSS from an elearning point of view, but you could actually use it in terms of e-marketing. As a project, we produce newsletters on a monthly or bi-monthly basis, we save up stories news and events to send out one newsletter which may or may not be fully read. If we get our end readers to subscribe to our RSS feed, we can update them daily on the latest project developments, whether that be news, podcasts, videos, product reviews etc. Worth thinking about more strategically perhaps. Click here to download the document(you need to give your name and email then a link to the document is sent to you - if you don't want to do this let me know and I'll get a copy to you)

Delivery hardware - the handheld Sony reader

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 15:26:00 +0000

When I first looked at this I have to say that I wasn't convinced. People like books, why would they want to carry around yet another mobile device? But then my boss pointed out that it could be a really useful device for field engineers to carry service manuals or perhaps to download training documents to be read later. So I thought I would investigate as this sounded like a really good application of this emerging technology.

I visited the Sony site to see if I could get a handle on the features. The main thing I noticed was there was nothing on there that really told you how you would get training material onto the reader. This would need to be straightforward for people to adopt it for use in their businesses. It seems that you can download books, but you have to do it through the sony connect store using some software that is provided with the reader. (sounds a bit like the ipod and iTunes...just try getting anything that isn't bought from the apple iTunes store onto your iPod and you will have to trawl various forums to find out how to do it because Apple don't make it easy for you.) Also, although it does say that the reader stores pdf's blog entries etc...These need to be converted into the correct format by the accompanying software. Without buying one and trying it out, its going to be hard to assess how much of a faff this is going to be. I'll see if I can do that...and report back.
update: Decided that I wouldn't pursue this at this stage. However, if there are any small businesses in the Yorkshire and Humberside area that could find a use for this, contact us and we will see if we can use your business as a pilot case.

iPod and beyond

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 17:46:00 +0000

Sorry there was no posting yesterday, I got bogged down with putting all the abstract stuff that I've come across into some sort of formal format. I tried to develop some sort of descision tree format as there is so much that you can do around elearning and an ipod. I must confess that this morning I did get sidetracked. My boss asked me to investigate how ipod can be used with projectors. I did find that you can connect an ipod to most projectors with an A/V cable, and to a telly....but I also found this after entering the bowels of geekdom: the early days of the ipod mini projector Of course its not n the market yet, but computer nerds all over the world are finding lots of wierd and wonderful ways to use the iPod...is this the sign of things to come?

ipod continued

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 19:02:00 +0000

After investigating the possibility of getting Flash elearning modules onto ipod, I discovered that it really isnt that simple - not impossible - but a bit fiddly. This is Bomski's (our boy wonder) explanation: "most of the conversion tools that turn flash into video.... need a linear timeline (no stopframes)most of our content is held in a containing movieclip in a single frame" I asked him for a simple explanation and it seems that Flash is like a videotape and the animations are made up of single frames; if our content was spread over many different frames, we could export it to video easily, as it stands, all our animations are held in one frame, so we would have to hack it and spread it across many frames, in order to get it into an acceptable state for conversion.

Maybe this idea should be shelved for a later date, as the beauty of our modules is that they are very interactive and this feature would be lost even if I did manage to convert them to mp4 format. Perhaps we could offer the same courses, but done in a different format using perhaps some of the animations from the flash modules but embedding them into powerpoint before converting to video. The possibility is there for later if anyone wants to trial it anyway.
update:click here to see how I overcame this

from powerpoint to ipod

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 06:26:00 +0000

Managed to get a powerpoint presentation into video format and onto an ipod, the quality is fantastic and I think that this could prove to be a really useful tool for training. Now I'm going to create a vodcast which will involve me setting up an RSS feed so that itunes can access it. This will mean that any employees who have an ipod (or even when they dont they can still download itunes and view on their PC) can subscribe to a series of video casts whether they be powerpoint or instructional videos. I am also going to look at converting Flash in the same way too as many of our modules are in this format.

Oh i also tried out youTube for uploading a video version of a powerpoint presentation:

Camtasia

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 05:55:00 +0000

Today I am going to download a trial version of Camtasia. This software allows you to capture screen movements and so is excellent for creating tutorials. You can even add video and audio to give it that complete learning experience. Once I've done this, I'm going to load the finished product onto a video ipod to see if it would be a feasible tool for the small business to use for training. I'm also going to use some free software to turn an ordinary powerPoint presentations into a video format and in turn make that available to download onto mobile devices such as a video ipod.

OK step one: I used a trial version of this really great software Presentation_to_Video_Converter to turn a powerpoint presentation into a video format. It really was very simple to do. You simply open up your presentation in this software set up how you want it to play and when you are ready, press start. As it was capturing the presentation it makes a transition through the screens and you can record a voice over or add sounds. Once finished, you can upload it to the web via google's new video upload program. This is a beta version and you can use others such as uTube. I'm not sure as yet whether the whole world can see it if they wish, I shall have to have a look into that. Here is the finished product: I think it shows how you could easily put together a presentation and post it to the web for people to watch wherever and whenever they needed. Great for the small business on a budget!

OK, so its not the best quality, but I didnt really tweak the settings, in fact I'm not sure I even selected the right format in the software. You can improve the quality by taking note of google's quality parameters

Pod Training

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 20:58:00 +0000

You've heard me mention Vodcasting earlier; that is, creating a video podcast to be downloaded and watched later from any device that can run it, namely ipods or some mobile computers and phones. This is not just a thing of the future and we should perhaps be thinking in terms of the demographics of our workforce and the fact that many of the younger employees are already fully au fait with this technology. Pod training could be the next big thing; it has many possibilities and advantages. See this page for more insight

There are now a number of technologies available as free downloads that convert your powerpoint presentations, flash content and other elearning formats into movie files. From this you can then convert them to MP4 format to run on video ipods. your users can subscribe via the itunes software that can be downloaded from Apple and they can download your vodcasts straight to their ipod video. Alternatively, users can download the video format direct from your server to their pcs or wap capable mobiles.Ineed to look into this a lot deeper, I would like to set one up and try it on a video ipod.

Storyboard software

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 00:09:00 +0000

Meeting this morning and all the inevitable catch-ups after meant that didn't get started until around 1.30 today...then got bogged down with trying to hunt down some news stories for the portal. Never mind, I did get some time to look at some story board software.

I'm not entirely certain whether anyone creating elearning content would ever want or need to go to the expense of using storyboarding software, but if you can stretch to around £150.00, it really does bring your ideas to life. You can create scenes and scenarios, customise characters and basically do a mock-up of how you want the module to play out. It would possibly be more useful to someone planning some roleplay scenarios, but I could see a use for it in content creation. There's something about holding a pencil in your hand though, that gets the imagination flowing...perhaps I'm getting old. I'll post the links to the software once i have a few to compare...watch this space