Management guru Peter Drucker noted that companies attracting the best knowledge workers will “secure the single biggest factor for competitive advantage.” We and other forward-looking companies put a lot of effort into hiring such people. What are we looking for?

Read the post ‘Our Googley Advice to students: Major in Learning’ here.

Malcolm Clarkson was an influential figure in the world of education publishing where he single-handedly set up his own publishing house and created a long list which was the envy of long-established houses. For 25 years he battled with fortitude and courage against Parkinson’s disease, always retaining his sense of humour and mental agility.

Read the full story in The Times here.

See the video at The New Yorker.(Link snagged from Guy Kawasaki’s blog here.)

Read his article (May 2000) ‘The New-Boy Network’ here.

Apana

Tom Kuhlmann has another great post on The Rapid E-Learning Blog. All of us have experienced this problem, very often when working with SMEs. Everybody know that they should stick to content which is need-to-know, but the principle is rarely followed.

I have seen one BPO in India using strictly need-to-know content for their voice and accent training with great results, so it actually does work.

Apana

CIO-Today, has an interesting article on the challenges facing internet regulators when it comes to including country specific, local language, and non-Roman domain names. China has already done this within the country and the potential for learning and development in countries like India with remote villages is enormous.

“Imagine for a moment how inconvenient it would be if the Internet had been invented in China and each time you typed in an address you had to use Chinese characters..”

A link to the full story is here.

I have completed the Certificate in Instructional Design for Senior Professionals from Wavelength eLearning Consulting & Training, Delhi. If you are looking for a course in elearning, look no further.

There are several courses available, but I am writing about the online courses. The courses are well structured and the asynchronous discussions are facilitated by Shafali Anand. I have already mentioned the IDSP certificate. Also check out the Instructional Design and Content Writing Certificate.

The IDSP certificate certainly helps me do my job better.

Shafali also has a superb Instructional Design Newsletter which is published once a month.

Apana

This blog has been neglected for a long time. Work and personal commitments kept me away. But better late than never, I am back, and have completed the Certificate in Instructional Design for Senior Professionals from Wavelength eLearning Consulting & Training, Delhi.

Apana

There is a very witty blog on The Times called Snakes and Ladders, and the other day Robert Cole had a post questioning the effectiveness of elearning, and, er … blogs. I’m posting it because I haven’t seen links to this snippet on other elearning blogs.

Read it here. Access the Snakes and Ladders blog here.

The entry has a link to the full report ‘Realising Value from Online Learning’ from the UK’s Chartered Management Institute, or download it directly here. (PDF download)

To my mind the two most significant barriers to online learning, brought out in the report, are:

• a lack of time
• easy to forget it’s there

Having spent my career in learning and development, I thought it time I had a ‘professional’ blog. (I already have a personal blog: Indian Wildlife Blog.)

While this blog will primarily focus on elearning, it will occasionally dwell on training and learning in general, and on usuability, a subject close to my heart. Though called Elearning India, this blog will not focus exclusively on India.

Comments are welcome.

Apana

I moved from instructor-led training to elearning a few months ago, and the learning curve has been steep and exciting, primarily because so much had to be unlearnt. While I have enrolled for the Post-graduate Diploma in instructional design from Symbiosis and will also do a course on instructional design for senior professionals from Vibrant Wavelength, the most useful learning has been from the various blogs I have been reading on a regular basis. This post is about the blogs I have found to be most useful. I read these daily and constantly bombard my team with links to interesting posts from them. (Okay, some of them are not blogs per se but they do have regular postings).

What I like most about these blogs is that they always have something you can take away with you and apply to make your learning more effective.

The most useful and insightful blog I have come across is Cathy Moore’s blog. Her ideas are simple, effective, and rely on a lot of common sense, prompting the reader to ask “Now, why didn’t I think of that?” And if you have already thought of that, here is corroboration from a senior professional.

Another superb resource is Jane Knight’s blog. Jane’s Elearning Pick of the Day lists resources to create elearning and enhance personal productivity, and lists new sites in the Web 2.0 space. Still further, Jane has what is arguable the best site on elearning resources at the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies, which has a comprehensive and categorised list on elearning tools which is constantly updated.

The next blog is Tom Kuhlmann’s Rapid eLearning Blog. Though focused on Articulate, this blog is a gem to anybody who wants to create effective and engaging elearning. Speaking of technology, do visit Tony Karrer’s eLearning Technology blog, which is also a must-read.

The next blog on my list is Clive Shepherd’s blog. One of the latest posts reviews several of the latest books on learning and development, and design. This post can be seen here. Moving on, the next is Karl Kapp’s blog, and when there do look at Karl’s book Gadgets, Games, and Gizmos for Learning. Another great blog is Christy Tucker’s Experiencing E-Learning. The posts are about varied topics, but are always interesting.

The last blog on my list is yet another must-read and is Stephen Downes’ Half an Hour. Polemical and provocative, this blog inspires you to think, and that is always a good thing. Stephen’s website can be accessed here.

Creating Passionate Users, Kathy Sierra’s blog, is now – sadly – discontinued. However, it has 405 posts and I recommend you read them all.

My next four sites are about usability and I have included them here because, all too often, I have opened an elearning demo or sample, and don’t know how to navigate or how to start the module. Three of them belong to the founders of the Nielsen Norman Group. The first is Bruce Tognazzni’s page, asktog.com. A series of occasional articles appear on this page and focus on usability issues in the real world, ranging from HCI, to cars, to the iPhone. Always interesting and above all, written with a lot of humour.

Don Norman’s articles on usuabilty appear on jnd.com. Click on Essays to read his insightful articles on usability, design, and interaction.

Jakob Nielsen publishes his articles on usubility on useit.com and the archive of his Alertbox can be accessed here.

My last site on usability focuses on information design, visual explanations, and the presentation of graphics. This is The Work of Edward Tufte and Graphics Press and you can access the articles here.

That’s my list of must-read blogs / sites. If you feel there are any I have left out, do write in and let me know.