Great new FREE features from SnagIt

SnagIt, one of the best investments you'll ever make (and still only US$39,95!) has just added new one-click features for publishing to blogs, flickr, or skype, and added a nifty new 'desktop sticky note' tool, too.

How to paint the MONA LISA with MS PAINT

It's GGG....REAT! Karl Kapp's Book Tour-- Week 2

If you haven't yet gotten your hands on Karl Kapp's Gadgets, Games and Gizmos for Learning are missing out on a real treat. I spend a lot of time in trainer development work and have lately run into (yet another...) disturbing trend. Lots of trainers are interested in "Generations" training, but invariably these trainers are 50+ who stand and orate, backlit by their boring PowerPoint slides, about "Them": "the Millenialls", "the Xers"... and how we must tolerate and accommodate Them. It's about time we heard from someone who understands and defends Them-- the gamers, the future.

Kapp is a champion for "Them" and I, for one, can't wait to see more of Them in the workplace!

Fewer words, more text

Here's a new item for my "end of email" campaign. And amen! Frumpy Netiquette from Donald Clark's "Plan B" blog.

Just because they've HEARD of it doesn't mean it's valid...

...So lately I've experienced a new phenomenon: trainers and instructional designers knowingly including invalid, untested, or discredited tools or theories in training because it's "what people have heard of". To wit 1: a certain 4-letter personality-type assessment that has no construct validity, no predictive value, and boasts a body of "research" for which the insturment's publisher has provided the grant money on the condition that the grantee's research "promote the use of" the instrument. To wit 2: a certain TAXONOMY of training evaluation-- not a "model", or a "theory"-- that everyone has heard of, hardly anyone uses, and that has been shown time and time again to be flawed and, basically useless.

Both times the designers insisted on leaving the stuff in because "It's what the learners have heard of."

As practitioners, isn't it our responsibility to help people discover things they maybe haven't heard of?