learnandteachonline.com

The Chronicle of Higher Education held a chat about the University of New Orleans presence in Second life and published the transcript.

"Our hope is to attract students who are taking Internet courses, but miss the 'presence' and the sense of community found in a regular classroom," said Merrill L. Johnson, a university administrator.

I've attended lectures in Second Life, but it's always struck me as a waste of the benefits to sit around and listen and watch. I think the real promise for training in Second Life-type environments is to teach activities requiring physical activity and interacting with objects. OSHA requires training in lockout/tagout procedures, for example. It's a system for shutting down machinery and notifying others to prevent accidents. Training is often accomplished with video, but that's passive. Think how much more effective it would be to get virtually hands-on and watch the effect of not following the procedure.

I suppose there's not much interest among web developers to build things for a blue-collar crowd.

While I'd still like to try a new open source model for compliance training sometime, I am going to table the idea of trying an online course in s_____ h_________ training for the present.

I find I'm put off by all the competition -- afraid of the magnitude of it, but also dismayed by the character of it. Google always provides clues to commercial oversaturation. When I blog about h_________ training the contextual ads for training and for l__ firms and even loans are eagerly and persistently present, can't seem to shake them quick enough, even with masked content. And when I research the topic in search, the results are SEO-gamed to within an inch of my propriety. Just too much noise of a type I'm not in the temper to battle or to be associated with just now.

It makes me think that online compliance training in general may be taking on a slimy pall as a consequence of the marketing practices of its purveyors, in the same way that the abundance of affiliate programs and splogs have sullied the rep of online universities.

A rotten shame. We gotta clean up this town.

Still noodling with this online sexual harassment compliance course.

The California lawmakers did a smart thing by not allowing me to just write up some content and call it a qualifying course. They require that a lawyer or trainer experienced in discrimination be on hand to answer questions within two days. That's a good thing. I think a lot of times online courses are seen as the easy way out for trainees -- and for the corporate types contracting for it. Buy it, forget about it, and maybe it's all too easy to be worth much.

So... what if, instead of hiring or partnering with qualified trainers to enable this kind of hand-it-off thinking, I made an online course with which the organization's HR folks remained involved, and acted as the question answerers?

On larger HR staffs, there would be a qualified expert in discrimination. They could even do it as a team with a training specialist and an employment law specialist. It even seems like having the staff remain involved would be a plus if it came down to proving the company really tried to inform an employee who caused a harassment suit, wouldn't you think?

The social constructionist learning philosophy behind Moodle would lend itself perfectly to interaction in the built-in forums. I'd set up a section for each organization, and maybe think how to allow some interaction among the groups, or at least aggregate the fruits of previous discussions somehow.

I don't see any courses like this. Google searches are jammed with competing offerings (with all those California employees to train), but on a cursory review they look quite similar and not too inventive. What do you think? Would HR folks go for staying involved?

I've been researching this idea to make an ad-supported free compliance course in sexual harassment. I wonder if there would be a tiny market for organizations who actually want to teach the right thing do -- not just teach supervisors what to do to avoid liability. Nah. But a feminist orientation might be a unique differentiator!

I might try it. Goodness knows in California, mandated training can take some wild twists. If you have to go to traffic school you can go to one taught by a comedian, or one that serves a 5-course dinner. At least that's how it was when I live in L.A. in the 80s.

I've also set up a new Moodle installation, my first experience with version 1.8. Three or four years on, having used CSS a lot more than I had when I first played around with Moodle, I'm finding the new CSS setup not nearly so confounding, and see how sensible it is for themes. I'm modifying Urs Hunkler's Chameleon theme.

While the cool kids talk of nothing but socializing, Microsoft and Google, with their health records initiatives, will be going to the bank.

When I heard each and every Democratic candidate say in a recent debate there will be required electronic recordkeeping in healthcare, I thought "somebody's going to clean up."

Don't you think sometimes the Silicon Valley gang is so obsessed with shiny and hip consumer fluff that it misses real business opportunities -- and that it's part of a myopia that makes the bubble bigger and more fragile? I'd even go so far as to say that what they often seem to be selling is youthful coolness itself, a frighteningly intangible commodity!

With Dems in real control of the U.S. government in a couple of years, it would be smart to anticipate a ton of reinstated and new regulation, and think about the online opportunities. Many Web 2.0 principles could apply. Consider mandated training, for example. Lots of government regulations require organizations having a given number of employees to offer training on safety and other topics. Much of it has gone online, but companies have to buy it. What if it were offered on a free model, like social apps, which could be supported by advertising?

OK, I just reminded myself I was going to try just that with harassment training, based on free materials from California. Such training is required in California, and is starting to spread to other states. The training also can be used voluntarily by companies who care about these matters (or wish to appear to care).

I'll use Moodle. I'll let you know how it goes.

James Farmer, a clear thinker about online learning, works through how to sell the idea of blogging communities (complete with slides).

Much as I love message boards, I do think he's right -- blogs may be a better basis for internal organizational communication.

It seems like the OPML Community Server could be a perfect basis for a company intranet, using its blogs for information, its instant outlining for collaboration, and its NewsRiver aggregator for feed reading. In fact, it looks like its sister, Radio Userland's community Server, was pitched as an intranet solution.

As one of the commenters to James's post points out, the commenting piece is iffy. There are no comments yet in OPML blogs. Because I've been quite active in the beta user community that's grown up around the OPML editor, I've done a fair bit of conversing with other OPML bloggers via blog post. Sometimes it even happens in real time.

And I keep coming back to a scenario where comments from a group of blogs within a single community might be aggregated to form a sort of message board. This would actually be a pretty simple thing to do if comments were enabled and were available in RSS as a separate comment feed. You could then read the collective comments in a River of News-style aggregator, which displays posts across feeds in a chronological fashion.

So this brings us around full circle from the starting point of blogs versus message boards, in a completely harmonious and satisfying way, because aggregated comment feeds like this essentially become a message board -- read-only at this point, but with SSE added to the mix, you could reply.

JournURL is supposed to do something like this. I just haven't checked it out. Anybody know if it works the way I'm describing?

By way of Ted Cocheau, the next eLearning Forum looks at podcasting in the enterprise. You can attend virtually via Breeze. Seems like they'd make a podcast of it too?

You don't hear much yet about online corporate training and development via podcast, but I have to believe it's going to be huge.