…flying bullet points are not only annoying and gratuitous, they’re so annoying and gratuitous that they distract from the content. This isn’t a surprise.

Cathy’s asks why to use PowerPoint for e-learning at all when simply presenting information (why not just a pdf?). She says save the animation for realistic interactions in e-learning.

Tim explains, “In answering the question [the Google team] re-imagined email and instant-messaging in a connected world, a world in which messages no longer need to be sent from one place to another, but could become a conversation in the cloud. Effectively, a message (a wave) is a shared communications space with elements drawn from email, instant messaging, social networking, and even wikis.”

Read the rest of Tim O’Reilly’s long post on the implications of Wave. There are big changes in Internet communications coming fast. (GW)

Good performers won’t perform well if they don’t know what to do, or don’t have the stamina to do what is needed. You would never try to run a 10K race without preparing for it, would you? Well, you would NEVER send your best sales team out to work with customers if they weren’t ready for prime time!

Ellen concludes with this:

Any one of us whose work supports more effective training – or education, or performance support – also needs to model that same pursuit of excellence that we expect from those in training, those that we purport to serve and support. Well, we do if we want to be contenders.

Sound advice.

An important quote from the famous Did you know? video (version 3.0) which illustrates the reality shaped by technology and other factors that command a paradigm shift in education.

To breathe life into our informal learning strategies, we need to work on building a culture in our organizations where these roles will flourish. Sharing expertise and collaborating with others needs to be encouraged, recognized, and rewarded. Reaching out to others for support of learning needs to be viewed as a savvy strategy for getting up to speed and getting ahead. There has to be some room for informal conversation and sharing experiences. In an economic environment where time is increasingly scarce, interpersonal interactions may be undervalued and underutilized, and that will have serious consequences on learning in our organizations. The live element of learning is something to monitor… we can’t let our enthusiasm for information-based informal learning strategies shortchange our learners with regard to the interpersonal aspects of learning.