Sex! Death! Food! - and Patterns!?

Now that should have grabbed your attention - well, your brain's attention anyway! And if you're unsure why...

...then don't miss out on a great podcast interview by Ginger Campbell with John Medina. (To download right click and Save Target As... Brain Rules with Dr. John Medina.) We could paraphrase things here - but our advice is simply listen and enjoy for yourself.

John's book (Brain Rules) is a must read, and certainly one of our current favourite 'brain' books at present. And the website for the book is certainly worth enjoying too. There are a number of things we could take on board from these points - and even the Doing E-learning podcasts will try to take account of the principles.

By the way, if having listened to the cast you want to see how your brain copes in the basketball catching counting experiment then click here to check it out at Illinois University's Visual Cognition Lab. Further experiments are here.

Podcast #2 - Rapid e-learning 101!

Rapid e-learning - but 'rapid' what? Rapid development? Rapid business benefits? Rapid tools? ...or simply rapid hype!

Is it really the next big thing in e-learning?

No more reading... time to listen. Check out our latest podcast - and find out what we mean by the 3Rs of Rapid E-learning, as well as our top 10 rapid factors!

Click the controller below to play Rapid E-learning 101:



Alternatively, right mouse click and select Save Target As... to download Rapid E-learning 101.

Mac users may need to hold CTRL and click, then select Download Linked File.

As per our cast, you may like to have a look at the following:

• Larstan Business Report: Managing Knowledge in Internet Time: Rapid e-Learning Maximizes the Time/Value of Mission Oriented Training


• Bersin & Associates report: Rapid e-learning: What works


• The eLearning Guild's Rapid White Paper

Podcast news

Next Wednesday, 21st May - Doing E-learning will be bringing you our Rapid e-learning '101' podcast.

Very timely as two days later the eLearning Network is hosting a live debate on the subject - Rapid e-learning: dumbing down or gearing up?

Don't forget to subscribe so that you get each one as it comes!

STOP PRESS: e-learning tools!

It seems to have been a hectic few weeks in the e-learning tools market, not least in 'rapid' tools.

Many of the established names have either been releasing newer versions of their tools, or promising new releases later in the year - as well as a few new entrants to the market, with none other than Microsoft making a sneaky appearance!

Raptivity 5.0 has been talking up its 'rich text formatting options'. Atlantic Link released news on how courses can now be developed directly to the native screen sizes for the Sony PSP Slim & Lite. RapideL-i announced a 'host of new features' and a total of 100 templates!

Adobe continues to grow its e-learning offering with its updated Acrobat Connect Pro 7 - due at the end of this month - which will be pushed as a 'large-scale web conferencing tool'. And Webtora is coming out in Q4 2008 - basically a 'Web 2.0' version of Lectora, allowing collaboration among content authors.

And all of the above without mentioning Microsoft's truly 'soft' launch of its *FREE* Learning Content Development System (LCDS), which appeared at the backend of April.

As part of a recent project, one of us here at Doing E-learning had to trial a vast number of the 'rapid tools'. The market is a huge battleground at the moment, with a vast number of them out there adding and improving what's on offer in a series of head to heads - and that can only be good.

E-brain training

Next week on SharpBrains they'll be publishing a full interview with Martin Buschkühl, one of the researchers who recently published findings on how motivated people engaged in mental exercise had improved problem solving ability in unrelated areas. (See The Telegraph's article.)

It has to be said that the findings didn't come as any real surprise, but it will be interesting to hear about his research and ponder how it could benefit Instructional Design.

In a teaser to whet our appetite, Buschkühl comments on the adaptive, complex and transferable aspects of the technology based puzzle he used, stating: "technology, when designed and used well, can expand the realm of the possible."

Now that's the best endorsement for effective e-learning we here at Doing E-learning have heard in a long time.

Podcast #1 - What is e-learning? - 2 of 2

Click the controller below to play What is e-learning? - part 2 of 2:



Alternatively, right mouse click and select Save Target As... to download What is e-learning? - part 2 of 2.

Mac users may need to hold CTRL and click, then select Download Linked File.

Microsoft + e-learning + free = good news?

Since the latter half of April, Microsoft's venture into the e-learning tools market has been upon us.

Over the past few weeks there's been the odd post here and there mentioning Microsoft's recently launched Learning Content Development System (LCDS) (download the 44Mb file for free if you want). But talk about it has only slowly been building momentum.


Like the 'rapid e-learning' tools currently out there it's got a template approach, and outputs SCORM 1.2 compliant material. We've downloaded it at Doing E-learning and have it on our computers, but as yet haven't found the time to check it out!

Hopefully Kineo will soon add this one to their review list and we'll all be the wiser with minimal effort!

E-learning - for all?

Just a week or so on from the CIPD's annual survey stating that 39% of the UK's small businesses wanted to 'do e-learning' (at least for those linked to the CIPD), a study from Germany states 1 in 2 small businesses "wants to invest in e-learning in future".

All indications point to a shift towards e-learning, but this venture for small businesses has to be cost efficient. It'll be interesting to see which route(s) they go down - if they want true effectiveness then surely not just off the shelf courses. Formal DIY courseware, and informal web 2.0 content seem the most likely alternatives. But which will come out on top? Will the great revolution in 'learning 2.0' be driven by 'the little guys'?

In the States wikis do appear to be flavour of the moment for sales training, with one success story even making it into The Wall Street Journal last month.

But will this approach be limited to organisations who have highly motivated individuals?

Working memory... less is sometimes more

How good's your working memory? Better than a 7 year old chimpanzee called Ayumu?

We happened across a fascinating CNN article a while ago on research at the Primate Research Institute (Kyoto University), where a number of chimps have been learning linguistic skills.

The experiment below is on working memory and numerals. Ayumu is shown a series of unique numbers (between 1 to 9) in random locations on a screen. After 0.21s, each number is then covered by a blank square - at which point Ayumu has to press on the blank boxes to match the original numerical sequence.

Play the clip below before reading on - make sure you're concentrating :-)




Amazing - and Ayumu didn't even appear to be concentrating that hard!

When repeated with students (who spent 3 months practising) they couldn't equal this chimp's feat (80% accuracy, cf. 40% for the students).

One aspect of success was age: the ability to remember a 'snapshot' of information decreases with onset of adulthood (young chimp vs. adult human). A theory on top of this is that the human brain 'loses' some of its working memory abilities to be able to apply itself to bigger and better things - for example language, and higher order thinking.

There's a lot more at the excellent CNN article, where you can even try these tests out for yourself! And if you want to know more about Ayumu and his friends, click here.

Open Science... let's properly evaluate

Here's an interesting little article on games and learning in schools in the Guardian by Outer Hebridean blogger John Kirriemuir. John writes about teachers blogging "their good and bad experiences". If this is correct, then if sufficient numbers took to the cause and blogged their results, we'd have sufficient data that backs up the need for an educational revolution. (Our fingers are crossed here - much needed analysis, problem solving, and other higher cognitive skills learnt from games would be a coup.)



It got us thinking at Doing E-learning that the blogosphere should be an invaluable way of relaying empirical evidence on learning in organisations, especially around efficacy. A whole new community of web 2.0 L&D researchers could emerge off the back of analysing published data and findings.

This idea's been around for a number of years now in academia. Open Science - aka Open Source Science - is about making research data publicly available, and not 'hiding' it in costly journals. Surely it's only a matter of time with the mass usage of wikis and blogs until researchers publish their data openly, and build on web 2.0 philosophy.

It'll be interesting to see how the likes of the One Big Lab blog take off.