Sunday, December 30, 2007

Is learning a new language one of your resolutions?

Web 2.0 tools are fantastic for help in learning a language. Do you want to find a native language buddy to practice writing in the new language? Want to get help with punctuation? Want to listen to movies or music in a different language? Want to practise speaking and listening? Do you want to download a free textbook for learning. You can do all this and more to help you reach your New Year's resolution.

Here are some sites to check out:

www.italki.com
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Spanish/Contents
http://babelfish.altavista.com/
http://english.hanban.edu.cn/market/HanBanE/412360.htm

Happy New Year!

Sunday, December 2, 2007


What did you learn about learning in 2007?

From Tony Karrer and other's I learned about eLearning 2.0 tools. I've been concentrating on WBT and LMS for years. I was more concerned with EOD for Authorware and what tools I would be using to replace it. I was also disappointed in the elearning I was creating and that many companies seem to equate converted Powerpoints with eLearning.

Using Web 2.0 tools in learning is really exciting to me. In the Forum for the Future, I explored some of these tools and how we could use them within our firm. We've identified two projects for wikis (in support of training) and are looking at how we can use eLearning 2.0 for actually providing learning activity to our learners.

Saturday, December 1, 2007

Forum for the Future

I haven't written this week, because it was a very full week for me. The global training team at Latham put on a Technology Trainer's Summit where we learned, shared and planned training for the future at Latham. Our big topic this year was Office 2007 and Vista and our theme was
"Changes".

One of the sessions I helped to present was called Forum of the Future. In this session we talked about making training more accessable to the learner. If I can figure out how to link in a downloadable file, I'll share my presentation. Otherwise, I'll start copying in pages of it. We discussed blogs, wikis, rss feeds and other elearning 2.0 tools.

We are expecially interested in finding a different way to use our tip sheets. We have written over 500 nicely formatted tip sheets in Word format. They contain great information in a How To task approach and are great for using in instructor-led classes. Students take them back and store them in binders or in that pile we all have on the desk. We have them posted on our CDC, but they are searchable only by title and category. We are looking for other ways to host the content. We need them to be totally searchable, indexed by How to headlines and easy to access. However, we still need the nicely formatted tip sheets for class, so a wiki doesn't seem to be the best format for that. Our web development team is working with Work Product Libraries and new search tools to access documents in our document management system (interwoven) So we will be looking initially to using this feature.

We are looking at using wiki's (probably through Sharepoint) for our Technology Team bi-weekly meeting minutes. In fact we will be approaching our senior technology managers about putting all of the different technology meeting minutes in such a format. Now they are in Word documents that can be accessed from the appropriate team webpage, one at a time. If you want to find the date for a roll-out and you know it was discussed in one of last month's meetings, you have to search each one. I'll keep you informed on how this works.

Jennifer