Someone emailed me today to ask what trends I thought were emerging that us trainer/consultant/wanderers should be taking notice of.
Two trends I have been noticing that are both scary and exciting to me are
- People are making knowledge and ideas available for free. This blog includes some of my trade secrets in the hope that they will be useful to others. But that is nothing compared to MIT publishing entire course curricula online or the sheer volume of free information you can get in wikipedia, youtube and other places;
- People are increasingly interacting, doing business and learning online. I did my entire masters degree online and yet even that experience was pretty mundane compared to the emerging opportunities that are emerging – youtube based videos, ebooks, Secondlife (yes – I still think we can do a lot of training in 3d worlds) and even mentoring by Skype and twitter.
So I am planning to spend some time over the Christmas break, just browsing and checking in with what the rest of the world is up to.
But before I have even started, COFA tweated this intriguing link to me (and the rest of the world):
http://online.cofa.unsw.edu.au/learning-to-teach-online/ltto-episodes
It appears to be free training and information sharing for teachers in the area of online learning. I guess it makes sense that you should learn to tech online by going online.
So, I here-by designate myself an eager student of online communication and learning. Now I just need to find the time to log in and start learning.
Do you know any other elearning or e-living links I should be exploring?
James King 
Hi James
James Bach is a very well respected tester, and he has been training people via the web in many ways for a while now.
Here are some of the resources he makes available for free, he also does testing training via desktop sharing and skype, and has some kind of informal college of students / colleagues that has coalesced round his knowledge and enthusiasm.
http://www.satisfice.com/testmethod.shtml
http://www.satisfice.com/blog/
And here’s his philosophy on learning which is ideally suited to learning via the web.
http://www.buccaneerscholar.com/
“This website is dedicated to a certain lifestyle of mind. I call it intellectual buccaneering. I call myself a buccaneer-scholar.”
“Just as the original buccaneers would not submit to authority in their pursuit of worldly riches, neither do us modern buccaneers yoke ourselves to authority in the pursuit of a rich education. We construct truth and meaning for ourselves.”
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