One can only imagine the number of bogus degrees produced!

I will admit to be fascinated by prominent people buying online degrees, in much the same way others follow the latest romances of stars. In Degrees by Mail: Look what you can buy for only $499!!! I wrote about the US$499.00 purchase of an online degree by someone who should have known better and didn't even seemingly need the degree. In The Stripper and the Bogus Online Degree I wrote about "A former stripper, known professionally as Princess Cheyenne, [who] was found guilty of 19 of 25 counts 'of fraud and larceny for posing as a licensed psychologist for seven years and treating clients'" because her degree was not legitimate.

Moral here: if it sounds too good to be true it probably is - and it may be worth the effort of checking credentials before you hire or do business with anyone.

One of my favorites is Roger Schank's prediction for 2010 in eLearn Magazine: "Bye bye phone," predicting the demise of mobile learning citing the difficulty of reading a phone or even an iPod screen. Others are touting the same technology.

Curt Bonk immediately responded:

I thought Roger Schank's prediction was the most ridiculous. He is not thinking outside the box - bendable and fold-out screens and electronically projected ones. Samsung is working on that. Mobile devices tomorrow are not what we see today. But bold predictions like Roger's would get people to chat and interact.

And Saul came back:

My point. I said it was my favorite - but I didn't say why or that I agreed with him. :)

Interestingly, the only comments that critiqued the Predictions for 2010 were about Roger's prediction. One said,

How can you say its going to go away from the phone, especially with the iPhone and Android-based phones that allow for simulations and interactivity that couldn't be done before?

Maybe it is just my age group (under 30), but I find that I'm constant using my iPhone for on-demand learning, whether it be to Google something, access a video tutorial (like Lynda.com), get my RSS feeds, etc... I think mLearning is just in its infancy and we will continue to see it grow.

Just my $0.02. Cheers!

Another person commented,

Dr. Schank - I have followed you and your career for years and I have immensely benefited from your body of knowledge. I am curious, however, about your bye, bye phone prediction for 2010. While I agree in someways (yet not in others) that a full blown training program may not best be delivered via mobile features or applications, I strongly feel that mobile devices hold incredible promise for learning and will only increase in the future. The traditional training paradigm of larger/longer scale design for learning has been engaged in a renaissance for sometime - in saying this I am thinking of re-useable learning objects, simulations, storytelling, game theory, virtual worlds, etc - major premises that can enable a strong mobile learning platform, paradigm, and adaptation.

One of the greatest benefits I see of mobile devices (and I hope there will be many) is the push of learning information as needed or the pull of information as wanted - not to mention the simultaneous usage of features on today's equipment (think AT&T and Apple''s ability to talk and use apps at the same time). The connectedness to corporate systems/innovative design approaches and the creative implications of the larger learning outcome(s) to a mobile event is what will make this either a smooth learning experience or a disastrous one. I'm a bit more optimistic.

I can't help but also think about how opinion was similar about CBT/WBT to what now is "eLearning" - once upon a time.

Is it time for a rebuttal from Roger?

The article concludes, "I believe that autonomy, competence, relatedness and critical thinking are the best ways to establish a balanced approach to technology, and so enhance our well-being." The same statement could be made about successful students, online or otherwise. Read the article for a fascinating discussion that might make you - horrors - shut off some of your devices and stop coveting the latest smart phone entry on the market.

Our biggest news in 2009 was the addition of Jill Duffy, senior editor, ACM headquarters staff, in June 2009. Beginning July 1, 2009, eLearn began a new effort to post more new content, increase readership and traffic to the site, and promote more discussion with user comments.

More content. Since July, eLearn Magazine has been publishing two new articles every week, steadily, in addition to one to two blog posts per week. The range of content has expanded to include not only articles about corporate training and online learning in higher ed., but also: book reviews, research reports, best practices, case studies, tips for both professors and students, trends pieces, and more. Take a look at some of the best content below in the "Top 10 Most Popular Articles."

Diversified outreach strategy. Readers can find out about the new content by visiting the homepage where it is highlighted, signing up to receive our twice monthly email newsletter, watching for RSS updates (which are synched into ACM’s digital library), and following eLearnMag on Twitter and Plurk. This diversified outreach strategy allows us to reach readers from different sectors of e-learning and different areas of the world, based on their online activity and preferences.

Increased readership. Readership has increased measurably since we started these initiatives to improve content, frequency of content, and outreach. Our strongest month in 2009 was October, when nearly 23,000 people visited the site and looked at more than 45,000 pages of content. Compared to July, October's numbers showed a 58 percent increase in readership and a 54 percent increase in pageviews! November proved nearly as strong as October, and the statistics for December are forecasted to be just as strong.

International recognition. In the past six months, eLearn Magazine was viewed in nearly every country across the world - 196 countries and territories by Google's count (which is more than the number of countries recognized by the U.N.) We have yet to make strides in Turkmenistan, Gabon, and a few other places, though it's good to have clear objectives for the future!

While the overwhelming majority of our readers were in the United States when they visited the site, we saw thousands of readers from each of the following countries: United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, India, German, The Philippines, Spain, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and France.

Growing advisory board. We've also focused on expanding our advisory board to include new names and faces that represent a e-learning on a much broader and more international scale than in the past, and we hope to continue adding new - and more importantly, highly engaged and motivated - board members and editors in 2010. Our board:

Hend Suliman Al-Khalifa, King Saud University, Riyadh (advisory board) -e-learning higher education issues in the Middle East
Saul Carliner, Concordia University, Montreal (advisory board) -education technology
Janet Clarey, Brandon Hall Research (advisory board) -corporate learning and development, as well as research and analysis
Denise Doig, managing editor, ACM headquarters staff
Jill Duffy, senior editor, ACM headquarters staff
Stephen Downes, National Research Council of Canada (advisory board) -research and education technology
Lisa Gualtieri, Editor-in-Chief
Karl M. Kapp, Bloomsburg University (advisory board) -instructional technology and business operations
Don Norman, Northwestern University and University of California-San Diego (advisory board) -specialized in user advocacy, design
Mark Notess, Indiana University (advisory board) -usability and software development
Clark Quinn, Quinnovation (advisory board) -learning systems design
Allison Rossett, San Diego State University (advisory board) -educational technology and business technologies for learning and performance
Roger C. Schank, eLearn Magazine's contributing editor and opinion columnist -learning theory, cognitive science, research

More to Come in 2010. We look forward to continuing these efforts to make eLearn Magazine even better in 2010. We have been working on a redesigned web site to better support this endeavor and hope to share more with you on this front in the coming months.

eLearn Magazine is not only for you, but it is by you; please contact us if you are interested in contributing or if you have suggestions for how we can better meet your needs.

And finally: Top 10 Most Popular Articles on eLearnMag.org
From July 1, 2009 to December 22, 2009

1. E-learning 2.0
By Stephen Downes, National Research Council of Canada

2. 10 Things I've Learned About Teaching Online
By Michelle Everson, University of Minnesota

3. Tips and Tools for Fostering a Creative e-Learning Class
By Susan Doctoroff Landay, President of Trainers Warehouse

4. 15 Tips for Webinars: How to Add Impact When You Present Online
By Patricia Fripp, CSP, CPAE

5. How Tiny Camcorders are Changing Education
By Laurie Rowell

6. E-Learning Tools for STEM
By Maria H. Andersen, Muskegon Community College

7. Discussion Management Tips for Online Educators
By Jo Macek, Anthem Education Group

8. Threading, Tagging, and Higher-Order Thinking
By Mary Burns, Education Development Center, Indonesia

9. Seven Steps to Better E-learning
By Clark N. Quinn, Director, Quinnovation

10. E-learning, Online Learning, Web-based Learning, or Distance Learning: Unveiling the Ambiguity in Current Terminology
By Susanna Tsai and Paulo Machado, InkiTiki Corporation, Island of Kauai, Hawaii, InkiTiki.com

Although e-learning has grown and become more technologically sophisticated, much of Jamie's advice echos what was in a course I developed in 2001 as part of a team at EDS. The course, How to Be an Online Learner, was developed as the first online course and a prerequisite for other courses for the Laborers-AGC Education and Training Fund, a partnership between the Laborers' International Union of North America (LIUNA) and The Associated General Contractors of America (AGC).

We thought it was important to get students online and get them accustomed to being online students before taking a "real" course. Of course, it assumed that students could get online and use a browser, which fewer people could do then than in 2010. The course covered how to be a successful student and how it is different to be a student online than in the classroom, offering guidance about motivation, time management, setting up a good study environment, and online behavior and interaction. It also covered how to use the tools in the Laborers-AGC online course environment.

The next course was on fitting and cleaning a respirator and it was a "blended" course since there was supervised practice. I can still remember the issues as well as the consequences of not fitting or cleaning a respirator well. Which goes to show that the best way to learn something is to teach it. I'll add #11 to Jamie's list: Seek opportunities to teach others to reinforce your own learning.

make educational and course materials more accessible online to students worldwide. Lots of educational content is not indexed or accessible on the public web. Various users have proposed finding ways to help content owners put formerly exclusive content online, including offline materials (lectures, textbooks, videotaped workshops) and limited-access materials (scholarly papers, research dissertations); help teachers themselves become more available online (access to online profs, 24/7 homework help, cross-country study groups); and to make all this material and academic help accessible through both computer and mobile platforms.

Could Google provide an effective and easy mechanism to not necessarily consolidate but to search for existing course materials? How would it deal with the deep web where so many courses are internal to an institution? And, finally, how would they set up the essential scaffolding that can make the difference between passive and active learning? I guess the next step is not the answers to these questions but the final idea selection.

Having conducted role plays online, twitter struck me as an ideal technology to employ. A teamwork skills training project I worked on used role plays to help emergency medical teams appreciate the knowledge, skills, and coordination required by jobs other than their own. Everyone was involved in the role plays; some students were assigned roles, and others were assigned the role of critic, all using synchronous technology. I can easily see that twitter would allow for a role play like that to be done, where there is interaction and sequencing of events, and where a postmortem of the session could reinforce learning.

It is exciting to see instances of technologies used in creative ways. The last really innovative use I saw of twitter was qwitter, for smoking-cessation, but there was no indication that it had been successful at the intended goal. TwHistory is, of course, doing something very different and I hope it will meet with great success - one of the successes being to excite educators to use twitter for role plays.

Have you ever developed technology training? It tends to be dreary, dry, and pedantic: this is how to open a file; now YOU try it. What a challenge: to develop online courses that help healthcare professionals reach a level of EHR proficiency quickly. Any ideas? Does $80 million spur your creative thoughts?

Investigate online training options. Instead of automatically sending your team to an outside training course (and incurring high travel expenses), search the Internet for alternative online options. You may find an equally effective, and less expensive, solution for your training needs.

Each morning at DevLearn09, Brent Schlenker primed his audience with a deceptively simple question: What one thing did you learn?. It is the perfect filter for the deluge of learning opportunities that is DevLearn. Imagine some 1200 passionate learning professionals, fueled by provocative speakers, good food, free wireless, and abundant social opportunities. What couldn't I learn? I have a plethora of notes, tweets and ideas on wireless everywhere, augmented reality, co-designed learning experiences, immersive learning simulations, corporate microblogging, cloud computing....

And now it is three weeks later. I am back in the office, that place where enthusiasm, experimentation and the enterprise must somehow meaningfully mesh. Ellen Wagner captures this discord with precision in my favourite slide of the conference (how's that for microcontent). In her survey of emerging technologies she juxtaposes Gartner's Hype Cycle with Roger's Diffusion of Innovations, and then maps where our stakeholders need our support versus where many of us would like to spend our time. Notably, there is no overlap.

So, rethinking Brent's question three weeks on, I wonder if I have learned any means of bringing bridging this gap in my practice. I have learned three things, I think, one for each time he asked the question:

1) Narrate your work.
Why? The reason goes well beyond supporting better collaboration says Andrew McAfee. Broadcasting your expertise and publishing your questions makes it easier to find people who can support your business goals. Blogs and microblogs knit together colleagues separated by discipline and geography in unique and productive ways. But how can we narrate our work when social media platforms are not part of the IT infrastructure? In their session on user-generated content, Colleen Carmean and Beth Davis ask, "What are elearning professionals doing to lower the threshold for publishing?" It is easier to advocate publishing when stakeholders and elearning professionals are interested in the same tools. Colleen Carmean points out that learners and staff use Web 2.0 tools at home, experience the benefits, and bring their expectations to the workplace. In the last six months, I've used a wiki, tracked progress in collaborative project management software, and, surprisingly, collaborated in Facebook. Admittedly, these activities have been peripheral activities, and none of them are core projects. But they were non-existent only a year ago. My experience is that the potential of emerging technologies compells nearly everyone eventually.

2) Trust that your friends will show you what you need.
I knew there were zombies among us at DevLearn, but I haven't paid attention to serious games and simulations since 2005, when I demonstrably closed my Second Life account. I am interested, but I have never found stakeholders equally receptive. My crammed agenda made it easy to say no to Alicia Sanchez's Serious Games Zone. But a flash on her screen during a hallway demo of the Krongregate game site captured my peripheral attention and yanked me out of my planned trajectory. A few minutes couldn't hurt, so I returned later to find out how games could be used to improve foreign language skills (a personal interest), and again on the session on adventure games. The next day, when Eric Zimmerman pointed out that "games are the media of systems," I found myself nodding in agreement. When Rajat Paharia described how media companies leverage our desire for virtual rewards into customer engagement, my mind had already started whirring with new learning applications. That afternoon I had a chance encounter with an instructional designer and World of Warcraft aficionado, who offered me a tour of Azeroth. Back in my hotel room I received my umpteenth Facebook invitation to some phenomenon called FarmVille. I decided to accept. Conferences like DevLearn are flush with serendipitous paths. But only when Leo Laporte advised that we trust our friends did I realize that this was in fact what I had been doing. This is the info-overloaded learning professional's equivalent of falling backwards into a crowd and knowing they will catch you.

3) Things do not take as long as you imagine.
A corollary of what did you learn might be what did you unlearn. For several years, I have been unlearning my assumptions about how long activities take. Rapid elearning challenged my assumptions about training development. The TED Talks made me see that complex presentations could be delivered in under twenty minutes. Last year, I learned that with microblogging tools like twitter let us learn in 140 character doses. At DevLearn I discovered that research time can also be shrunk. In his session on real time research, Mark Friedman reported on collaborative twitter research that was conceived, executed, analyzed and reported in just two days (during a conference no less). Yes, real time research is a somewhat improvisational investigation, perhaps not suited to make groundbreaking scholarly advancements, but it does suggest a way to explore ways that different areas in an organization might collaborate before committing huge dollars. And there are few models for successful collaboration among disparate colleagues. This is surely something stakeholders would be interested in.

What I like about these three things is that they are inspired by emerging technologies, but not dependent on IT infrastructure. They are of interest to passionate learning professionals and passionate stakeholders alike, and they drive all of us forward, or at the very least do not impede progress along the innovation curve, at whatever pace that happens to be.

Shanta Rohse is a learning advisor and enthusiast for Canadian Blood Services. She narrates her work at portable learner and on twitter/shantarohse.