James King

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?