Is a Blackberry like a lump of lead around your neck?

When talking with many of our customers the answer would appear to be a resounding yes.  Employees of companies that have adopted Blackberry technology tend to feel trapped, on one hand they hate their Blackberries but on the other feel they can’t live without them.

The big question is why?

I personally see a Blackberry as a more advanced version of a pager.  They feel more like a way of the company communicating to/at you rather than a tool to help you do your job better and more efficiently.

We’ve had so many reports of people not even able to get a full nights sleep because an email or a message will come through and they can’t resist reading it and responding to it.

So how do companies make a Blackberry more attractive to its employees?  How could it be more of a useful tool?

As an employee how would you feel if instead of a Blackberry you were offered a learning device which would not only send you corporate communications but also offer you a complete multimedia training solution?  Maybe a tool that could help you perform research for that important meeting you are on your way to?  A tool that is constantly connected to the company and the world at large but also has the ability to disconnect from work out of hours and offer social entertainment?

When the iPhone was first launched in late 2007 it was just a small object of desire, a phone with entertainment and web browsing as standard.  The problem was it had limited business use.  That has changed with version 2 though and Apple are now tackling Blackberry head-on with full support for Microsoft Exchange and push emails.

Blackberries would appear to be optimised for email first, iPhone for web.  In this information hungry world surely a phone that is optimised for the internet has far greater potential as a business tool?

Now that Apple have included 3rd party application support it has opened up a whole new world of possibility for the iPhone and its users.  Apps like Salesforce Mobile, a tool for organising and referencing prospect information and data or Lion Clock, an app that lets you keep track of project billing on the go.

As a company you also have the benefit with the iPhone of rolling out training to each and every handset no matter of the end users location.  Whether it’s a video message from the CEO or a Flash-based training exercise the iPhone can handle it no problem and report back to base when the results from the training are in.

This morning over on Jay Cross’s Informal Learning blog there is a video he filmed yesterday at the Future of Media Summit ‘08 featuring Robert Scoble talking about where he feels learning will be in the immediate future.  For me the interesting point he made around his baby boy growing up in the world that is always connected seemed completely logical.  The ability to research absolutely anything right now is going to be vital going forwards, not just for businesses but also for individuals and life in general.  You can watch the whole video below.

So how would you feel if your company was to give you an iPhone instead of Blackberry?  Would it inspire you, motivate you or still weigh you down?

 

Is e-learning yesterday’s news?

Are we out of date by even mentioning the term e-learning here? Is it even necessary these days? Let’s look at the facts.

According to learning entrepreneur Jay Cross he coined the term “elearning” in 1998.

Then Blackboard Inc. were awarded a patent for the term “e-learning” in January 2006.

A web backlash against Blackboard Inc. came about shortly after and a wiki was formed which attributes e-learning to Vannevar Bush all the way back in 1945 when he wrote an article about a proposed hypertext-like machine called the Memex.

Does this mean that if we offer “e-learning” as one of our services we run the risk of infringing on a patent set by a competitor?

Elearning, e-learning, electronic learning, enhanced learning  whatever it’s called it would appear to have been around for a while now.  Does this mean elearning is an old term though?  Does the term e-learning have any place in this technologically advanced world?

Our company, Marton House is of course synonymous with the term e-learning as it is a massive part of our company offering.  Though we quite often recommend instead a blended approach to learning, with facilitators and trainers supporting the material or vice versa with the materials supporting them.

So does that mean e-learning as a stand alone product has had it’s day?  On the whole probably not as the benefits of e-learning still outstrips many more traditional approaches.  It’s cost effective, it can be simultaneously rolled out in multiple locations world wide, it can feature data and accurate result tracking which is very difficult and slow to achieve in more traditional forms of delivery, and it can replicate and simulate complex systems during the learning process which means training mistakes do not occur on live customer facing systems.

Is it evolving though?

I’m currently doing some e-learning myself in the form of learning Spanish via my Nintendo DS.  Suddenly I find myself as the student rather than the deliverer and as much as I have every belief in this game and what it can offer me on my path to speaking Spanish there is sadly one thing that is sorely lacking – the human touch.  I met up with a buen amigo of mine at the weekend who speaks Spanish and for the first time I could put the individual words I had learnt into sentences.

Having someone to quiz and bounce off is sometimes the most vital need for the learning process.

The trick to effective training and learning is all about support.

So we mix e-learning with more traditional methods of delivery and we get “blended learning”, a term that does the job but doesn’t exactly get everyone in the room jumping up and down with excitement.  It’s not a new term either.

Then we have feedback and peer learning as an extension to that approach.

So should we be pioneering a new term?  Maybe it’s just me but electronic learning does make me think of the children’s learning aid machines from the 1980’s such as Speak ‘n’ Spell and blended learning makes me think of learning how to make cocktails.

We are dangerously close to the term “e-learning 2.0” cropping up and that makes me shudder.  It’s too easy these days to strap on the term “2.0” to anything which is new but, as the evidence shows it is happening across all areas (see web 2.0, business 2.0, Jake 2.0 etc.)

Tomorrow we take a look at the journey from “e-learning 1.0” to “e-learning 2.0“.  How did we get here and how on earth did we end up versioning everything?