eLearning, So What’s New?

This morning when I read the Herald, there was a story in a supplement on Education about eLearning. The supplement is obviously focussed on students heading for Uni for the first time and Abcd – e – learning was well written and researched, and it was a supplement, but I was also thinking, that it was ironic that it was presented as if it is something new. It was interesting that while I couldn’t find a link on the Herald’s website, I guess because it was a commercial supplement, I did find a story about using podcasting (which was key to this morning’s story) written in July last year called Pupils book place in world with podcasting, by Martha McKenzie-Minifie.

The story was largely about universities including MIT, Berkeley UC and Yale posting lectures as podcasts on iTunes U. It was about the benefits of students being able to listen to podcasts and make sure they don’t miss anything.

This was interesting timing because I have been having discussions with Massey University about eLearning for sometime and last month launched the Location Innovation Awards, which runs until February 16th 2009. I was considering adding eLearning to one of the categories, but given that the Awards are in fact a learning experience and the categories of Location Based Games, Social Networking, Proximity Based Marketing and widgets for AA Maps all provide scope not only for learning, but offer the opportunity for supporting education that is location based. For example a location based game music elearning could involve a treasure hunt in a community based around learning about the history of the area, which could be cultural, historical, ecological, environmental and so on.

In a recent blog I wrote about Music eLearning on the net and made reference to Gordon Dryden’s new book, Unlimited – The New Learning Revolution (which is totally about eLearning) which he told me will be on the retail shelves within a week or so. I feel I relate well to Gordon because I was also frustrated and bored with school as a teenager.

The problem for me was that I wanted to be a songwriter and musician and my parents sent me to a school where the major subject was rugby and music was a 40 minute session 3 times a month or so. By the time I got to 5th form I was bored to tears with subjects that I felt (and still feel) were irrelevant (although I guess there were a couple of exceptions, being French and Latin which have both served me well.

I didn’t pay much attention in class, was bored, found other ways to amuse myself. At the end of the year come exam time, I used a form of eLearning. I got all my school notes, typed them up on a typewriter, read them out loud into a tape recorder and played them back to myself while listening to Led Zeppelin in the background. Now I was aware already that Baroch music is far more conducent to learning, because it has a tempo that your brain matches into a state which is good for absorbing information. However, it wasn’t cool and this still worked and I did pass my exams, except for Geography which is ironic given that I speak a number of languages and have travelled aorund the world several times, it was just hard to record maps:)

I have been using audio tapes for many years to enhance my learning. I recorded radio shows and learned about cosmic string theory, and also bought and used Psychology tapes to learn about NLP, negotiation and other skills.

This morning in the shower I was learning about SPIME, which is very pertinent to my current focus of Location Based Services. I learned about it from a podcast interview with David Orban on the podcast of The Future and You by Stephen Euin Cobb. “A Spime is a location-aware, environment-aware, self-logging, self-documenting, uniquely identified object that flings off data about itself and its environment in great quantities.”

This technology is very relevant to my work in car navigation and future driving safety. Imagine if every car had SPIME technology and independant of any internet or cellular telecommunication technology, cars could communicate with each other, ensuring safe driving in terms of car proximity to each other, safe following speed and distance and the ability to react to an emergancy. For example, if the car in front of you engages its ABS and brakes suddenly. A SPIME technology could potentially tell your car which is following it, about the situation and have it react potentially seconds before your brain and foot can engage with your brake pedal. This could be a marvellous development of ADAS.

Anyway, I am heading off on a tangent, but the thing is that eLearning continues to keep me abreast of the latest developments in the fields I am interested in and you do not have to be a university student to access the information.

I often listen to University Lectures at iTunes U and so can you. If you are interested in a topic and want to follow the lectures whether you are studyig at a university or not, they are as close as your iPod.

While this blog is starting to get a good following, I would love to get more readers and encouraging me to keep writing. If you feel that my blog is interesting I would be very grateful if you would vote for me in the category of best blog at the NetGuide Web Awards. Note that the form starts each site with www whereas my blog doesn’t and is of course https://luigicappel.wordpress.com.

Thanks so much for your support:)

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Angry People

This morning as I was listening to a Jimi Hendrix MP3, reading a couple of articles in The Business herald while waiting for my CRM to synchronise, I noticed a column from Seth Godin saying Angy People Are Different and there were some common threads and something missing.

None of them really had a good answer for how to deal with angry people. Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison were sying F them in the Arse. This was a bootleg audio clip from a live show that a friend in France sent me. Not very productive.

There was a story in this morning’s NZ Business Herald (not on the net yet) by Neil Green talking about how GlaxoSmithKline spend most of their time justifying their position, even after being found guilty of exaggerating the amount of Vitamin C in Ribena. On their web site they have made some announcements about what they have changed and they haven’t done a bad job, but what they haven’t done is made a personal apology and made a human face.

Something I note all the time is that business and commerce is ultimately about people doing business with people and you should forget that at your peril. What amazes me is that the very people who learn from case studies in university (and Ribena is bound to be in one in the future) don’t remember their lessons when they get in the real world. Bad publicity is often an opportunity to put on a positive face and it is well known in the world of sales that the relationship with key clients is often far better after effectively managing a problem, than it was before the problem arose.

Debbie Mayo-Smith is one of the great imports to New Zealand and often speaks and writes about pitching to the emotion and reaffirms what all sales and marketing people have taught, but some have forgotten, haven’t I just said it. People do business with people. My relationship with all brands whose (note the last word) products I use is at a personal level. I use their products personally. If I find a pip in a tin of pipless peaches and contact the QA department of the manufacturer who listens, apologises and sends me some free product, I no longer talk about the pip, I talk about the genuine caring nature of the company who put things right. I trust them more than ever. The brand that says, shit happens, if we get 1 wrong in 10,000 products its good, get over yourself, I will stop using them because they don’t care and I am angry.

So back to Seth Godin. What I learned when studying Psychology and Negotiation was based around NLP or Neuro-Linguistic Programming. If you try to soothe or calm the person who is angry, you are likely to upset them more because they will think you are being patronising. If you justify your position without acknowledging the other person’s position as Glaxo did, you will lose their trust as has happened in New Zealand with Ribena, where thousands of parents gave this product to their children thinking it was far superior to other fruit juice products on the market. They feel cheated and justifying your position just tells them that you feel you are superior to them.

In NLP they talk about pacing the person first. If they are talking in a loud angry voice, do the same. Get on their level. Show them that you empathise with them and would feel the same way in their shoes. A common mantra in negotiation is the 3 F’s of Feel, Felt, Found. I know how you feel, I had a similar experience to yours and what I actually found was……………….

The most important thing is sincerity in the use of this technique. People are adept at seeing through insincerity whether they are conscious of it or not. If you were genuinely wrong, admit it and do something about it.

Now if only Housing New Zealand could learn from this.