NYNP blog post 6-11-09

Notes from Day 2 of the International Conference on E-Learning in the Workplace

For those who couldn't make it to the conference, I thought you'd be interested in notes on my three favorite sessions of the day.

Using technology to transform teaching vs. to extend teaching
Anders I. Morch of the University of Oslo, Norway presented "Teacher Perspectives on Learning with Mobile Technologies," which compared the results of introducing PDAs for students into classrooms in two different schools. At one school, the teachers used the PDAs for traditional activities such as having students type lists of vocabulary words. This was an example of extending traditional teaching practices onto new technology. At the other school, the teachers transformed their teaching by using the PDAs to have students create concept maps, animations, and visualizations of learning. Morch suggested that e-learning practitioners consider whether we are using technology to transform the way we train, or just extending old methods onto new technology without considering the possibilities.

Video-based role-plays
Patrick Blum of inside Business Group, Germany presented "Interactive, Dynamic Video-Based Training in Corporate Learning," in which he demonstrated video-based branching scenarios, or conversation trees, that offered realistic skills practice. The video-based e-learning simulated a conversation between a customer and the learner, with video of a customer talking and reacting to decisions made by the learner. It was used to replace live role-plays during classroom training, and offers a solution to organizations that would like to give staff the opportunity to practice live conversations, with standardized step-by-step feedback, without deploying a legion of classroom trainers.

Turning factual knowledge into practical, applicable training that prepares students for the real world
Tucker Harding of Columbia University's Center for New Media Teaching and Learning presented "Intelligent Simulation Technology for Training Humanitarian Practitioners," in which he demonstrated a case study/simulation hybrid in which learners make political decisions about a theoretical Country X. The demonstration was created to help students apply classroom learning to realistic situations, and he noted that the Center's website at http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu offers access to their project portfolio, where you can see how they've used technology in purposeful ways on 200 projects in order to improve education.

Today was also the day that Zora and I did our presentation, which was a lot of fun. We were excited to show BELL's e-learning to experts in the field, and it was interesting to hear the questions and feedback from the e-learning community.