How to get professional development spending approved

Our October newsletter is out and this month we have two new articles including "How to get professional development spending approved" by Catherine Mitchell of One Voice Productions. We also have our regulars like Industry Events and Fave Find so check it out now!

Information overload :s

I loooove tools like Twitter because they put you in touch with other like-minded people all wanting to share information, which is a great thing on a number of levels. But I found myself this morning reading through recent Tweets from my connections and I realised that there is absolutely no way I will ever get to read all the information being shared. This made me a little sad because I love everything about learning, so I wonder what I'm missing out on. At the same time I could feel myself getting a little stressed about the pile of links I have started accumulating that I will have a look at "when I get time". Is there a tipping point where all this information is of absolutely no use to us at all because we'll never get the time to read it, absorb it and learn from it?

Get your learning/training/coaching articles published for free online!

Our learning resource portal http://www.getmelearningresources.com always needs more interesting, well-written articles on any aspect of learning, training or coaching. If you have an article you would like to submit, please review our submission guidelines and send it through. We look forward to hearing from you!

GAAHHHH I hate e-learning!!

I was looking for Twitter users to follow today and did a keyword search on elearning & e-learning. It was interesting to see some of the results that appeared with people's negative comments about elearning. Here's a few examples: "omggg e learning is soo stressful!", "e learning made easy. Lol.", "Omg *** i hate e learning", "GAAHHHH I hate e-learning!!". So I'm thinking, is this down to bad design? Is it the content? Is it the duration of lessons? Maybe we'll never know. This just goes to highlight the importance of doing a needs analysis prior to developing elearning. Find out what people's past experiences are and what their drivers are for learning and you stand a far better chance of engaging them, not driving them to Tweet!

The eLearning Brothers

Being a bit of a geek, I spend a lot of time on the internet and today I found The eLearning Brothers. This website sells elearning templates which are fully customisable. In a world where speed is of the essence, these kinds of tools can save heaps of design/development time so if you're creating elearning programs it's definitely worth checking out what they have on offer.

We've had a baby and a facelift!

2010 has been full of action and excitement for the Get Me business, and we're afraid to say that our newsletter became a casualty of those events. But we're pleased to announce that GMLR news is back and if you're not already one of our merry band of subscribers, you can view the latest edition online.

It looks pretty, but can people use it?

I've been involved with many learning projects that require setup of a central document repository for learning materials and other associated business documentation. In some cases this is purely a little reference resource and in others it was a full-blown intranet. The key to having a user friendly site is to do some research with your target audience about how they search for things and then to do some usability testing with the. The undoubted King of Usability is Jakob Nielsen. I've also used his methodologies when running pilot tests for elearning we have created. If you are creating any kind of online solution, from website to intranet to elearning I would definitely recommend checking out Nielsen's website.

LTUG goes visual

Our good friends at LTUG (Learning Technologies User Group) have transferred their online community to a new space on Ning - they are now "Visual Communication". If you are into tools which help you convey information in visual format, then this is the place to go. There are groups for Web 2.0, web conferencing, video conferencing, YouTube and more. Check them out at http://visualcommunication.ning.com/

Training vs learning?

I am in the process of redesigning the Get Me website, which is long overdue! As part of this exercise I've been researching keywords to use on the site. In our industry we like to use the word "learning" instead of "training" because as professionals we understand the difference. However, I was surpised to find that in Australia in June/July this year, the term "training and development" was searched for 18,100 times as opposed to "learning and development" which was only searched for 9,900 times! As a seasoned professional I feel quite strongly that the word learning should be substituted for training wherever possible - with the exception of our website if I want visitors to find us! Are we the only ones that care about learning vs training? Tell us what you think by posting a comment below...