I don’t normally promote any particular vendor or service, but occasionally I come across something that looks worth drawing attention to. In this case it’s the brain-friendly training offered by Brain in Business.

I have no commercial or other connection with this company or its directors, I just like the look of the course they offer on ‘How to be a Brain Friendly Trainer’. The next one runs on 24th – 27th September  in the South East of England. There are more details here.

What I like about this approach is its focus on learning, not on content (how much can we squeeze into people in an hour?) nor on technology (look at this e-learning! It’s cool! Now, what can we use it for?). This focus on learning means that trainers are liberated to do the best possible job by concentrating on:

• how people learn
• how to train so that people learn
• developing materials to support that training
• delivering those materials properly
• putting it all together

In an industry like learning and development where so much is ad hoc and unstructured, it’s good to see somebody putting together a coherent approach to the fundamentals of what we’re doing: helping people learn.

It was our most ambitious event ever, with 7 concurrent speakers at any one time, and a focus on interaction and sharing. From the feedback – verbal and written – though, it seems that yesterday’s Learning and Skills Group Conference was a definite success.

We had a great line up of speakers, including Jay Cross, Tony Buzan, Nigel Paine and Jane Hart. We also had speakers and facilitators drawn from the members of the Learning and Skills Group itself, and their involvement was one of the great successes of the conference for me.

Each event makes me start planning the next with greater enthusiasm. Here are some thoughts I’m carrying into the next conference:

• Small cafe sessions in their own rooms
• More LSG members as facilitators and speakers
• Closer interaction between the online community and the conference community

Planning for 2010 has already begun!

I’ve never met Dr Weber in person, but we have been in contact via Twitter, and I chalk this week’s BOTW down as a success for microblogging.

Dr Weber is the CEO of MITA (Multiple Intelligences Teaching Approach), and a former teacher, so she is mostly focused on education rather than on work-based L&D. All the same, her blog  – Brain Leaders and Learners – provides plenty of food for thought, as it’s based on a good understanding of what actually happens in the brain during learning, rather than on pop-psychology. 

It’s impossible to pick a best three from this site, as I normally would. It’s too full of good stuff. Instead, I recommend you visit and enjoy looking around. If you really want a place to get started, try here 25 Facts to rejuvenate your brain, or here: Multi-Task for Bottlenecked Brain.

Has the world gone mad?

Surely only a blog with a history of hundreds of entries is worthy of the prestigious Blog of the Week award?

Usually, yes. However, today we make an exception for Charles Jennings of Duntroon. If you’re in the Learning and Development field you probably already know Charles, formerly the global head of Learning and Development for Thomson Reuters.

Charles is always worth listening to, is very generous with his time, and has plenty of insight to share from his background in business and academia.

Which is why today’s blog of the week goes to Charles Jennings’ blog. Which only has one entry. I just know it will be worth following in the future.

That sole entry is a considered review of The Sabre-Toothed Future. The subtitle for the blog is improving performance through learning innovation. Expect more thought-provoking stuff to follow.

On April 1st, Brandon Hall released a $195, 54-page review entitled Using Google for Online Learning: 25 Easy-to-Use Applications, authored by Janet Clarey, Senior Researcher & Analyst.

Now what on earth is all this about? Google tools for learning? Aren’t learning tools those things we use to create and distribute learning content?

Actually, I think it’s pretty spot on.

The point about the Google tools for learning is that they are not designed for explicit learning targeted at improving workplace performance. They are not, in other words, traditionally in the province of the Learning and Development (L&D) department. Nonetheless, they are tools that people use to organise information and understand the world and so learn. They are also free. The widespread availability of these tools at no cost should give L&D professionals to consider how much their role focuses on content production, and how much on facilitating the learning of others.

Among the 25 tools listed are the ones you might expect, such as Custom Search and YouTube, Books, Knol, Reader and Scholar, but also some you might be more surprised by, such as Calendar.

My first reaction to Google Calendar was that it seemed a bit of push to include it, but Clarey provides good examples of its use as a training administration tool, particularly for synchronous events. Google Desktop, too, seems as if it would be an easy way to create a Personal Learning Environment.

At least a couple of the tools, though, look odd on the list. Google Code, surely, is not so much a learning tool as a programming tool, and Google Documents does not seem to offer any particular advantage to L&D over other forms of shared document production (although Geoff Cain of Tacoma does a great job of showing how they can be used for assessment).

By assembling these different tools together, this report makes us consider them not just individually, but also in collaboration. Imagine, for example, bespoke search and feed burning functions set up in conjunction with social learning groups and Google Knol to collect and share information. For many organisations that would be a good first step into a less formal learning environment, with only the cost being the time to set it up.

Ironically in this free environment, this report carries a $195 price tag, which is likely to restrict its readership to the larger corporate. This is not an attack on Brandon Hall, which has to pay its way, and it very transparent about its finances in every document it produces. It’s just possibly a missed opportunity. In a price-sensitive market like online information, this report would have been guaranteed far wider circulation if it had been free – a prospect that would surely have appealed to any prospective advertiser.

Despite the price issue, this document challenges assumptions about what makes up a learning tool, and makes us consider what the L&D dept can do. Perhaps L&D could spend less time creating courseware and more time facilitating the learning of others by providing the right tools and context for effective learning outside courses.

I was busy compiling a list of great Twitter Tools when I found that – of course – someone else had got there first and done a bang up job.

Two someones, actually.

The first is Yunghui Lim, whose 8 Excellent Tools to Extract Insights from Twitter Streams is generating a great deal of traffic on Social Media Today.

The second is Britain’s own Phil Bradley, the librarian with attitude, whose Twitter Search – 20 alternative search enginesactually contains more utilities that I have found useful, because they are all about search. The worst thing about Twitter is that it’s endlessly ephemeral. Neil Lasher has compared it to ’shouting out of the window while driving the car”. A lot of the shouts are nonsense. Some are really valuable.

My two favourite utilities:

Tweepsearch - lets you find people you might actually have something in common with based on key words in their biographies

Monitter – provides a live feed on key word searches of tweets. Automatically refreshes. Like   Tweetscan, but for three words at a time.  

One that I think is useful, but can’t quite make my mind up:

Tweet Effect – tells you how many followers you picked up or lost on each tweet. Just how interested are people in your comments about your morning coffee?

Brandon Hall have released a free report on Learning Technology Products 2009. At 526 pages, it’s a useful reference guide to suppliers.

It contains extracts from three major Brandon Hall reports:

• Authoring Tool KnowledgeBase
• LMS KnowledgeBase
• LCMS KnowledgeBase

I like the way Brandon Hall are open about things. One of the headings in the report introduction is ‘How We Make Money’. Closely followed by ‘What We Don’t Do’. It’s all quite clear. They are able to supply this report for free, by the way, because it’s supported by supplier advertising. Fair enough. Let’s have more of such honesty.

I’m delighted to be a judge of this year’s Software Satisfaction Awards, run by Sift Media, the people behind Training Zone.

I’ll be judging in the Learning Software category, which Learning Technologies is sponsoring, and I look forward to seeing some of the great solutions out there.

If you’re at a learning technologies company and are interested, just click to enter the awards.

What’s not to like about Indiana-based learning and design specialist Cathy Moore? She has good ideas on how to design learning better and expresses them clearly. Here’s how she describes herself:

For more than 25 years, I’ve used technology to help people learn. These days, I help people strengthen their instructional design skills, and I design and write elearning for businesses.

That’s typical Cathy – clear and useful, with a sense of fun - as expressed by the title of her blog “Making change, lively ideas for e-learning”.

Unusually, in this BOTW I am not going to suggest a long list of blog entries to visit, just one: Be an elearning action hero!, from 2008 and brought to my attention by Clark Quinn yesterday.

In this post, Cathy describes using an action mapping approach to designing learning. In short this means beginning design not by asking ‘what does the learner need to know?’ but ‘what does the learner need to do?’ The difference: the former lends itself to spec creep, and the potentially endless addition of material. The latter focuses on the minimum amount of information needed to meet an organisational goal.

This week Cathy published her elearning blueprint which makes it easier to implement action mapping in e-learning.

Cathy, for your efforts in helping rid the world of boring elearning we salue you and present you with the coveted Learning Technologies Blog of the Week Award.

At this year’s Learning Technologies conference, we had three delegates kindly attend each session and write it up. With the rather grand title of ‘rapporteurs’ these delegates laboured away to produce a report on proceedings, and their work is now available here.

Click to read the Learning Technologies Conference 2009 Report.

If you’re a member of the Learning and Skills Group, this report will serve as a handy index to the 36 videos taken at the conference, and accessible via the Learning and Skills Group site.

Our thanks go to the rapporteurs:

• Karyn Romeis, Learning Anorak Ltd
• Jon Turner of Quistor
• Duncan Gotobed, Capita L&D