Quick Clicks – August 2011

As ever, aLearning is happy to help you save some time by providing you with some direct links to valuable stuff by other people. If you haven’t seen these yet, they’re worth your time or they wouldn’t be here.

Have links to posts, articles, sites and other online stuff that helped you in your association learning management? If so, drop me a line with the link so we can all benefit from it 🙂

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Jeff Hurt, over at Midcourse Corrections, discusses why learners’ brains need to “release pleasure chemicals” during your educational events (I’m not kidding — but the point he makes is serious and a good one). See his post, “Mission Possible: Engaging Event Attention.”

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Here are a couple of related posts… both work taking a look at.

First, Steve Woodruff posted the “Twelve Most Important Questions About Your Identity,”  and although it’s geared to for-profit corporations, you can easily adapt his questions for a quick assessment of your organization’s overall vision or plans for its learning component… Either way, great brainstorming starters.

Steve’s post inspired Michele Martin over at the Bamboo Project to post her PD adaptation, which is great for individual introspection about one’s professional direction… and maybe worth sharing with your members so they can consider educational offerings they might not have thought of before… See her post, “12 More Professional Development Questions” here.

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Michele Martin has so much great stuff, you should just subscribe to her feed and read her all the time. But, assuming you don’t have that kind of time, here’s another post worthy of special attention, “Future Skills 2020 and the Implications for Professional Development.”
http://www.michelemmartin.com/thebambooprojectblog/2011/07/future-skills-2020-and-the-implications-for-professional-development.html

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Clive Shepherd at Onlignment has offered up a great four-part series of posts, “A practical guide to creating learning videos.” Worth your time if you’re considering including video in your elearning curriculum:

Part 1.
Part 2.
Part 3.
Part 4.

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Craig Weiss at the E-Learning 24/7 Blog has done it again — here’s a must read for those of you looking for an LMS.

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Don’t know if this works, or how well it does what it says it does… but if you design training, educational events, or generally do instructional design for your association, you might want to check out DesignJot, “the first app developed to help…build better training.” I wouldn’t include it here without reviewing it myself except that I trust the folks at Allen Communication, who have an outstanding elearning reputation. See more info on DesignJot here.

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Finally, if you’re thinking “gamification” (!) — using games within your educational sessions (especially online learning) to enhance engagement and retention, take a look at Karl Kapp’s “Match Content to be Learning with Right Game Type.”