Top Ten eLearning Blogs

Top eLearning Blogs Update - One of the best new sources of high quality eLearning blogs is:

eLearning Learning

The Featured Sources on the Right Side of the page are more current than this list.

I was recently asked for a list of the top ten blogs that relate to corporate eLearning by someone who wanted to get a sense of content quality and value of reading blogs. I debated for a while, because I have quite a few blogs that I subscribe to and my personal style is to quickly scan a lot of blogs, selectively reading posts that I think are going to be interesting, comment on some, and post my thoughts about others. A Top Ten list is not all that relevant to my style, but I came to understand the request (from a very persistent person). That said, I still cheated (see below).

I think a better list to use is in my Blog Roll in the right column of my blog. There you can find a lot of great blogs. Further, I would highly recommend that you don't evaluate by only looking at these blogs periodically, rather - sign up for an RSS reader, e.g., Bloglines or Google Reader and subscribe to each blog. I've provided links to each blogs feed and also buttons to quickly add it to Bloglines, My Yahoo or Google Reader.

Also, if you feel I should have put other people in my Top Ten, I’m open for discussion/change.

So here are my top ten recommendations (in Alphabetical Order)...

Clive on Learning

Clive Shepherd - make learning things happen electronically

Corporate eLearning Strategies and Development

Brent Schlenker explores elearning in the corporate world -- with a personal touch

e-Clippings (Learning As Art)

Mark Oehlert – how culture and technology come together over the space we call 'learning.'

eLearning Technology

Yes, completely self serving pointer to my own blog. To get a sense of the blog try: First Time Visitor Guide

elearnspace

George Siemens - learning, networks, knowledge, technology, community

Harold Jarche

Harold Jarche's blog about "the intersection of learning, work & technology."

The Learning Circuits Blog

ASTD's blog associated with the Learning Circuits publication. It has various authors and does a monthly Big Question that receives contributions from many different bloggers.

Informal Learning Blog

Jay Cross' blog on informal learning.

Learning Matters!

Tony O’Driscoll – he's been around forever in eLearning and at IBM - but a relatively new blog.

Learnlets

Clark Quinn – Thoughts on learning and technology

Now let me cheat, here are four more great blogs. The first two are great aggregators that will allow you to see lots of interesting blog posts happening out in the web.

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily

Fantastic daily list of interesting blog posts including academia and corporate space.

Big Dog, Little Dog

Great aggregated links to all sorts of interesting articles.

Both of these blogs are by practitioners who I believe exemplify smart blogging as a personal learning mechanism. All practitioners should be doing what they are doing!

e-Training in the Trenches

In the Middle of the Curve

Finally, this is definitely the last time I do this. Next time, I'll just point people to posts like:

• The 19 Best Elearning Blogs
• Managing your RSS Feeds

And suggest that you do this on your own, over time. I'll continue to keep my blog roll updated in my blog. Way easier than creating this post.

The future of learning is DIY

Harold Jarche tells us - The future of learning is DIY (Do It Yourself) and points to:

With Google you can find most information that you need. YouTube is a quick and easy way to get “learning objects” to the world. Apple gives the essential tools for knowlege workers, and in a nice package. Wikipedia has shown that the wisdom of crowds is just as good as the wisdom of elites. Starbucks gives free-agents and road warriors a place to meet and work. These top brands provide the equivalent of the interstate highway system for the creative age.

He concludes with:

If you’re in the learning business, don’t try to build another LMS or portal. Instead, figure out ways that enable DIY. Believe it or not, learners can, and will, do the rest. They already are.

Well said Harold. And, as you know, I've been asking us to think about how we can help enable, support, teach DIY learning (personal learning - as I call it). And I still strongly believe we need to learn how to learn better ourselves first. So, it sounds like the question is figuring out ways that enable DIY learning.

Rational and Irrational Inattention

Just saw a report of findings from a new Federal Reserve study. It reminds us of how our the flood of information has real impact on day-to-day decision-making, even in a high impact area like trading.:

Our results suggest that market participants might be focusing irrationally on the headline number, as opposed to the most precise available data in a data release.

reading the text of the data release seems to be something that should be extraordinarily easy for the markets....

Some recent research in macroeconomics and finance has discussed the possibility of "rational inattention" in which agents optimally choose not to collect information because it is costly to do so (e.g. Sims, 2006).

The discussed "rational inattention" is the fact that many of us read the subject and first couple of sentences of an email to decide what we need to do with it as quickly as posssible. We make quick choices about what's important.

The "irrational inattention" that the study discusses later is when it's not conscious choices or poor choices in this area.

Reminder of How Much Things Are Changing

Brent pointed us back to this and it's a good reminder of the remarkable time we live in:



Brent point us to - the original ppt presentation created by Carl Fisch and posted at his blog The Fischbowl.

Wikis at Work

Found via Big Dog Little Dog - It's information collaboration - discusses the use of Wikis within organizations. Some of the points it makes:

• Gartner predicts that by 2009 half of companies worldwide will be using wikis
• Examples of use
• Acronyms and industry terminology, best sales practices, case studies, client information, meeting minutes.
• As a human resources site, in some cases replacing the company intranet, providing data on benefits, policies, new-employee orientation material.
• As a social-networking site where, through personal pages, employees can learn about their colleagues - what schools, previous employers, and professional and outside interests they share.

Certainly, I've been finding that Wikis are a really great replacement for stuff that we've previously done as web pages or using Robo Info/Help. Just makes updates that much easier. The natural extension is to then allow SMEs or Learners/Workers to make updates.

He also pointed at - Most Business Tech Pros Wary About Web 2.0 Tools In Business - some interesting items:

• Motorola has 3,900 active blogs, 3,300 separate wikis, 3,600 "project workspaces"
• More than half of companies don't use blogs at all, and 41% don't use wikis, our research finds. More than 20% make these tools available, but they're not widely used.
• Procter & Gamble is running an internal marketing campaign with the tagline "connect, converse, accelerate" as it rolls out real-time communications, a collaborative content portal, and desktop search.

One thing that's been interesting the past few years is that Desktop Search is only now taking off inside corporations. In fact, it's probably Vista's biggest benefit.