Since I missed most of it (other demands: bedtime stories and the like), I turned to a participant who did not seem to miss a tweet, Clark Quinn, who summarized:

The topic was organizational equivalents of the ePortfolio use in the academic world. The range of knowledge about ePortfolios surprised me; many people seemed unfamiliar with the concept. On the other hand, that made it a great learning occasion, which is a frequent occurrence.

There are always new people, it seems, and it seems they take a bit to get up to speed, then start pitching in. Most seem to get it, though I suspect a few get overwhelmed by the flow.

The topic really got me thinking about what would constitute the components of an ePortfolio, and I considered things like independent task performance, work-based task performance (both always with a reflective component on the thinking underlying the choice of approach), 360 perspective on performance.

Jay Cross noted that it's about your network, indicating that part of your portfolio might be who you know. I took that in a separate direction, thinking about having people indicate who they respect in the area, who's theories they follow, etc.

Realize that many other conversational threads are often going at one time!

As always, people crack jokes left and right, too, sometimes topic related, sometimes deliberately misinterpreting a statement. Jay's comment led to a subsequent crack: "Sorry, dude, your social network is not the caliber we're looking for in this position."

All in all, rapid fire learning and fun with a lively and aware crew.

Anyone agree - chat is such a blase term - #lrnparty next Thursday?

A Boston Globe article, Multi-tangle, points out that working memory is limited and that everything we do, even the things that seem automatic (with the exception of what we can do in our sleep like breathing), tax the brain. The article goes on to point out that multitasking is becoming part of our culture; which brings me back to my question: does e-learning create a culture of multitasking?

It is even more interesting to hear from them about how they found us and what they like. Linda Urban wrote:

Once again, I followed a link in an interesting sounding tweet related to online learning and found myself at an article in eLearn Magazine. This time, it's Mitigating Conflict in Online Student Teams, by Richard Dool, with some good solid suggestions based on experience working with teams. One last week I really enjoyed was Michelle Everson's article, 10 Things I've Learned About Teaching Online. And then there was the great experience of using the #lrnchat twitter meet-up, recounted by Dave Ferguson and Christy Petit, which opened up a whole new learning mode for me.

I continue to be delighted by the depth and breadth of knowledge that I find at eLearn Magazine. Thanks so much to those of you who gather and present this information - as well as to all the contributors!

Thanks so much, Linda, for letting us know what you've been reading and enjoying.

Okay, so maybe I am on the fence about using a Kindle for casual reading. What about for education?

The Boston Globe reported on the use of Kindles by 200 college students given free ones by Amazon.com. They found that "some students miss the decidedly low-tech conveniences of paper: highlighting, flagging pages with sticky notes, and scribbling in the margins." Students reportedly did not like the small keyboard and took fewer notes. They missed page numbers. It was hard to read on a dark early morning bus ride. Etc.

Pluses: the weight.

I wonder if a different design is needed to support students, and, if so, would the same one work for online students as those on campus or on the job?

This reminded me of when I took a mandatory course for parents when I enrolled my son in driver's education. I was not impressed with the instructor initially, primarily because of his response to my question about how to best teach someone to drive a car with manual transmission. He told me that everyone has automatic transmission and I should too. When I said that he hadn't answered my question, he restated his views on manual transmissions and my need for a new car. This did not make me highly receptive to his instruction, but I took notice when he said that the best thing to do henceforth when your budding driver is in the car is to voice your thoughts: How are the weather conditions affecting you, why are you slowing down, your concerns about the erratic driving of the car ahead of you, etc.

His point was that these generally unvoiced thoughts help the inexperienced driver, focused on basics, to taste the insights of years of experience. Transparent thinking. While Schon's book is not recent, making an expert's thinking transparent is not explicitly done in most courses, online or otherwise.

Managing Social Media Risks, by Bridget McCrea in T.H.E. Journal, covers another downside associated with the growing use of social media in educational settings: reputation damage. The article makes the excellent point that "many organizations and institutions prefer to ignore the problem" but that they should be active and diligent instead. Guidelines are mentioned, but they need to be created in a way that doesn't stifle the exact point of social media, and, of course, they need to be enforced.

I especially liked the comment following the article from David M. Adler, Esq.:

Many of our clients are asking for guidance on how to go about implementing social media as part of their online marketing strategy. First, we counsel clients to understand that employees are going to use social media with or without them. For companies seeking to leverage the social media frenzy the question is not "How do I control these relationships but, rather, "How do I leverage the value of all these relationships?" Second, we counsel clients to understand that they are building a social reputation, so it shouldn't be frivolous or uninteresting. Lastly, we counsel clients to focus on strategies that empower employees to become brand ambassadors, increase knowledge, share ideas and information and promote collaboration.

The rest of his comment is also insightful, and relevant to any organization, educational or otherwise. NIOSH is one of many organizations working through exactly these issues. But while organizations are dealing with social media risks, much of it still comes back to individuals. In the case of NIOSH, it's one person who tweets and hopes to continue doing so without too many restrictions imposed. And in my case, I'll return to my initial point: the biggest risk, I believe, is time management.

What struck me about this was the mixed blessings this technology affords depending on perspective.

For the teacher, there are start-up costs: the effort of learning a new system and converting materials. Since other teachers didn't discuss this, he might be a rogue. Then, there are the benefits that accrue from freeing up class time and also not having to prepare homework handouts, not to mention that less paper is used (unless students print everything themselves). His assignments arrive online and he may have tools to assist with grading. Finally, at the end of a class, he presumably can save everything easily and without boxes and folders.

Not so many mixed blessings, then, but lots positive especially if there isn't a steep learning or conversion curve.

For the students, who are now taking quizzes as part of their study time, the attitude might not be as positive. The security aspect of this seems questionable because the fact that they take it at the same time doesn't insure much besides - well, that they take it at the same time. The online assignments seem valuable because there is less paper to carry or lose and because it is presumably easier to go back to see past ones. I don't know what students have at the end - and how easy it is for them to save all their work unless they print it. Often students lose access at the end of a class or when they leave a school.

For students then, there seem to be more mixed blessings, not solely advantages.

Finally, there are administrators who may be seeking solutions that reduce paper, increase security, or increase the amount of material covered in the classroom.

All technologies introduce trade-offs but they really only become apparent when different perspectives are considered. Generally decisions to introduce and use technologies are not made by students or even by teachers.

The best way to appreciate performance support is to look at examples showing how it solves problems and elevates practice. I can remember twiddling my thumbs while waiting to do laundry in my dorm at college. When I wanted to do the wash, the washers and dryers were almost always busy, causing frustration late into the night. When I did get to it, the room-with scattered piles of laundry, wet and dry-disgusted me. This was the result of aggressive launderers, who chucked wash on the table if you weren't there to claim it. Enter e-Suds. The laundry process is civilized by introducing information and technology. USA Technologies installed Internet-based laundry systems on several university campuses. The system tracks the use of washers and dryers and then alerts students on the status of their laundry and the washers and dryers in close proximity via email, cell phone, or PDA . Imagine the benefits of knowing the "wash cycle is complete" on your load, or that a washer and dryer is available in Chavez Dormitory, floor 3, north end.

Rapid e-learning is a new concept to me. My experience with and knowledge of e-learning comes more in the form of academic distant learning, and rapid e-learning, from what I gather, has more to do with corporate training.

Because I'm not very experience with rapid e-learning, I might have some naive ideas about what it is, what it means, and what it can or cannot do. On the other hand, because my understanding of it is not colored, I can look at it fairly objectively.

My big question is why is it called "rapid e-learning?"

I spoke with Tom Kuhlman the other day, vice president of communities at Articulate, and writer of the Rapid e-Learning Blog, which is owned by Articulate, but is surprisingly non-partisan.

"Rapid" can be a little bit of a misnomer, he told me. (Funny. I thought "learning" was going to be the culprit!) He even mentioned that the majority of rapid e-learning tools out there do little more than turn a series of PowerPoint slides into a Flash animation. The rapidity, he said, is the time savings of not having to learn Flash.

At the Online Learning Conference at Digital Sandbox two weeks ago in New York, I listened to a number of trainers and instructional designers from major corporations (JetBlue, Adobe, Kaplan) discuss the need to create "engaging" and "compelling" content quickly so it could be rolled out to hundreds of people who needed to learn a procedure, fast.

Some of the "e-learning" comprised nothing more than a few slides containing multiple choice questions. Some were adaptive. Some were not. To me, this screams, "assessment," not "learning," and I think it's important to distinguish one from the other.

I'll write more thoughts and reflections about rapid e-learning as I continue to learn how it's used and who uses it.

I highly recommend it to all learning professionals!

Others are short-term; I made up one for my husband when he had trouble identifying Laura and Lauren on his soccer team (LaureN has No bangs) and it worked immediately. And Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie's famous detective, used mnemonics to win memory games.

I still use "Thirty days hath September..." to know the number of days in a particular month (even though my cell phone has a calendar on it). When I looked up mnemonics online, I found countless examples I don't remember seeing before (did I learn them and forget?) None struck me as useful enough to memorize now, but I did wonder if mnemonics are more easily taught in the classroom than online. Any thoughts?

In e-learning, pretty much everything is online, providing massive amounts of data that can be monitored and analyzed. Yet I don't know of online courses that recommend "since you spent a long time reading that, you might also enjoy this" or even "here are some other courses you might find useful". Is it that the data is different, or harder to mine, than Netflix data; that students don't want or need recommendations; or that education is not a commercial venture (at least not in the same way as Amazon or Netflix) and the goals of recommender systems are not applicable here?

In contrast, I started reading my first online book, The Twitter Book, available through Safari Books Online, a service the ACM provides members at no charge. As I read the book, I wondered how an online book is really any different than the electronic page-turner model of online education. Click, click, click.

Both the comic strip and the book are well-written. And both require you to click to get to the next screen. But the comic strip seemed to unfold in a way that the book did not. While reading the comic strip I never felt the compulsion to click through it like I did with the book and with many self-paced online courses. And I am more interested in expanding my knowledge of Twitter than refreshing my knowledge of factoring!

My conclusion: visual displays make an enormous difference. Do you agree?