With the thousands of apps available on the iPad, how do you decide which one to purchase when there is always the chance that the one you selected turns out to be a turkey, rather then a gem.

Until now, you were stuck with guessing or visting iPad app review sites geared towards everyone, and not corporate universities and educational institutions.

Starting today, that has changed.

Every week, CorpU will present a round-up of the top iPad apps covering various areas.

From boosting productivity, to writing and taking notes, to presentations with ease to experiencing the real power of mobile learning.

Plus each week, our new feature, “iPad apps you may never have heard of”, will present an in-depth and detailed review.

Our debut begins with an app you may never have heard of, but in reality is an impressive solution that shows the possibilities.

The Civil War Today

Price: $7.99
Made by: History Channel and Bottle Rocket

The Civil War Today is an incredible app that shows the power of self-contained mobile learning (that is to say, without having you go to a web site).

The feature set offers incredible capabilities that frankly shows the real power of what is possible in a self-contained app.

Features

What is great about this feature, is that you see the image of the person, their role, their actual handwritten note – in their own handwriting via a scan, and finally the text of the note.

But that is not all, especially when it comes to the social media.

Do you want to send out a Tweet? No, problem, but there is a twist, because as you know back then the Internet did not exist; so if you wanted to send a message you had to use a telegraph.

How do we define early adopters?

Are they companies and individuals who set out and say, “we are going to follow but add value”, or “we see what is possible and move forward”?

I say no.

Early adopters understand the power and benefits that come with the technology or solution. In the case of social learning, they realized the capabilities, foresaw the challenges, identified the features to bring about a new experience for their learners.

In turn, their learners responded. They gained insight, added value, engaged and inspired others, and brought a real sense of collaborative and community learning.

Social Learning is about adding social media types to e-learning.  It is taking that next step, to see what is possible, to try out new ideas for higher engagement boosting comprehension, retention and more importantly, synthesis.  Adult learners want to see real gains and a real world experience in their learning.

Social Learning enables that and more.

Can you add APIs (Application Program Interfaces) and Mashups to go beyond what is possible and explore new learning opportunities, regardless of the location?  Yes.  Can you enable your learners to create, edit and share in real time documents; offer new ideas and develop a sense of belonging through various new forms of social media?  Yes, to all the above.

That is the amazing strength of social learning, but it doesn’t stop there.

Virtual Worlds can be integrated with various social media offerings, and the next evolution of social learning incorporates augmented reality, mobile learning with tablets and the use of livecasting.

Will this make you an early adopter? Absolutely.  Will it offer an engagement and experience for your learners and equally as important, boost their productivity? Yes.

At this year’s Global Leadership Congress, Hitachi Data Systems, Mercer, Plastipak and General Mills will discuss the details on how they implemented and acheived success with social learning.

As an attendee, you too will experience social learning, first hand. Brainstorming, collaboration and engagement is included, all components of social learning.

A learning tool designed to help you identify the appropriate social learning types to meet your company’s business needs and eliminate the challenges is included.

So, who are the early adopters?

You are.

The Global Leadership Congress, Social Learning Roundtable will be May 11th, from 2-5 p.m.

If you haven’t yet registered for the Global Leadership Congress, seats are still available, although they are going fast. To learn more about the Global Leadership Congress, May 9-11th in Philadelphia, visit the event page.

How do we define social learning?

Is it a collaborative approach? Enhanced feature sets to engage learners? Strategy tied to learning initiatives from a business standpoint?

Or is it a way to ensure that our employees and our customers see the value of  learning and its benefits?

Benefits of Social Learning

• Gives power and provides engagement to your learners, they seek this out
• Eliminates passive training, now you can find out what your employees are thinking, responding and inquiring about
• Opens up an experience that can show the real impact of learning
• Does away with instructor led training that is often non-engaging, lacks interactivity and hopes that everyone asks questions and is involved (rarely the case)
• Enables people regardless of location, division, department to be part of something rather than nothing
• Offers opportunities to link to job roles, skills, leadership development using tools not available before

Two types of Social Learning & Benefits

Social Q/A

• End users ask questions, Subject matter experts respond, end users add comments
• Unique Value Proposition- establish mentoring program, one learner to one SME (via department, division, region, etc.)

Gain?

• Eliminates on the job training – which has been shown ineffective in the long term
• Identifies topics that could be used for future training

Scribd & Slideshare

• Employees or Trainers can upload presentations and share them with other learners
• Training department or employees can create, upload, read, print or share documents, audio/video files, presentations, spreadsheets, etc.

Unique Value Proposition

• Training Departments can provide quick reference materials, cards, video clips or presentations, audio, etc. to employees/customers and identify how many times they have been viewed, printed & shared – reduces cost to department for unnecessary future training or courses, reduces cost to department (eliminates printing/shipping), opens up global experience – which can be tied to native language (for example you have employees outside your home country)

Gain

• Localized learning
• Higher engagement
• Eliminates waste
• Identifies topics to train & topics to re-train (via blended learning or e-learning)

Bottom Line

Social Learning offers your learners, new opportunities, provides you as a training executive with future topics without the need of constant gap analysis, reduces costs in the short term and long term and identifies what your trainees need and want.

To gain a new perspective on social learning, please make sure to attend the exclusive event of the year, the Global Leadership Congress, May 9-11, 2011 in Philadelphia.  A roundtable on this topic and its strategy from a training and department angle will be presented. To learn more about the roundtable including the agenda, click Social Learning at GLC.

In our Social Learning Executive Council, we’ve spent the past 18 months studying how organizations are applying social media technologies to improve learning.  From our observations, one thing is clear: online learning via talking books with interactive video and conferencing with peers, experts and authors is going to happen…and it’s going to happen on an iPad or one of the other 30+ tablets we are now tracking (see The Tablet Tidal Wave).

2011 CorpU Social Learning Executive Council

Read more »

“Don’t let it come crashing down on you”

Defying all expectations, Apple’s iPad is selling over 1 million units monthly since inception.  The rise of eBooks is unstoppable.  Sure, you can be a naysayer; I was.  I like my print newspaper and my hardback books, thank you very much.

But it’s time to wake up to the fact that print book sales are declining:

Read more »

Last week, Corporate University Xchange offered a great webinar on social learning, “The Shifting Role of the CLO: From Learning Provider to Learning Enabler,” part of their on-going  work in this space.  There’s a body of research, an executive council dedicated to this topic and, if you haven’t read Lynn Lehman’s blog postings on this topic ( http://blogs.corpu.com/author/lynn-lehman/ ), you’re missing a rich resource.

It was a pleasure to serve as the host for three reasons: it’s a topic of great interest to me, the participants on the call were truly engaged and I got to work with the expert panel of leading practitioners who use social media technologies (and some that are not so new) to address contemporary business challenges in ways that improve collaboration and drive innovation.  The panelists were Krys Moskal-Amdurer, VP People Development at Pearson; Irada Sadykhova, Sr. Director of Engineering Leadership and Organization Effectiveness at Microsoft; and Brad Samargya, Corporate SVP/Chief Learning Officer for CA, Inc.

In this wide-ranging discussion, these CLOs talked about what they are doing at their respective companies, successes and “lessons learned” in social learning.  Participants shared via poll questions, chat boxes, off-line questions…it was a busy hour!   It’s a hot topic…here are the two reasons why I think we must embrace social media in the workplace to drive productivity, engagement and business results. Read more »

As a follow-up to yesterday’s great Corporate University Xchange webinar, The Shifting Role of the CLO, From Learning Provider to Learning Enabler, here are suggested resources from the Corporate University Xchange and other professional sources (many do require membership) to learn more about social learning:

• Corporate University Xchange:(2010) Creating a Social Learning Environment Checklist A companion to the the CorpU report, Creating a Social Learning Environment: A High-Level Overview of the Steps to Designing, Developing, and Piloting a Social Learning Platform, this checklist provides the steps and sub-steps necessary to create a social learning environment (SLE).
• (2010) Using Social Learning to Launch the Verizon Wireless DROID In this archived webinar, the Verizon Wireless Learning Organization tells how they created a social learning environment, built around a single-purpose device blog, to connect their corporate-wide employees to read, watch, listen, and learn about the new Smartphone, dubbed DROID. The DROID Blog launched with over 400,000 views in the first two months, surpassing initial expectations.
• (2010) Using Microsoft SharePoint for Learning: A Snapshot of Current Practice This quantitative research study found that while a majority of companies (about 70%) own Microsoft SharePoint, only 30% of those respondents claimed that they utilize SharePoint to support learning programs. Learn how SharePoint is being used to enable learning support at no additional expense to create asynchronous classrooms, support instructor led training, and connect Communities of Practice. Read more »

I recently finished writing up a report on a qualitative study conducted on the different processes that corporate learning organizations are using to design, develop, and implement Microsoft SharePoint 2007 – traditionally more of a content management system – for collaborative learning purposes (see Using Microsoft SharePoint for Learning: A Snapshot of Current Practice). Although I was initially skeptical about using this software to create an effective collaborative and networked learning platform, I am now of the mind that it can, indeed, be considered a good choice for enabling social learning. Read more »

I just finished reading an article entitled Managing Multimedia written by Elliott Masie in the July 2010 issue of Chief Learning Officer Magazine. In this column, Masie states that there has been an increase in the use of video sharing as a corporate learning methodology, claims that one of the major challenges is how to store and provide access to video clips, and lists several functions that learning leaders would like to see as part of the video sharing systems, such as tagging and rating.

Although I have no argument with anything that Masie says in his article, I do propose that Masie and other observers of this trend often overlook the most important aspect of video sharing. Read more »

I heard something quite interesting this week…a story about a company that recently dismissed its entire leaning and development (L&D) organization and is now conducting all learning activity via a computer-based collaboration platform. I’m sure you are familiar with this type of software platform – it provides a virtual environment in which people can network with one another, share ideas and best practices through blogs, ask and answer questions on discussion forums, possibly share video clips, access files and other media, etc. Some might see this bold decision as groundbreaking and “cutting edge” considering the current hype surrounding social learning. However, while there does appear to be potential for such environments to leverage informal learning by capturing and providing access to the tacit wisdom of the crowds, I have been researching social learning tools and strategies over the past year and a half and do not yet see enough hard evidence that collaboration platforms promote learning transfer to support such a drastic change. Read more »