News

Inspiring the next generation

Over the centuries we have made stong advances in medicine, technology and our undertanding of the world we live in. But, despite all our advancement one facet of life that has not changed is how we are trained.

On Thursday, 12 June 2008, Dr. Martyn Wild gave a very rewarding presentation on this topic, as it relates to eLearning and "how we can make it cheaper, better and more effective than before".

Welcome Scott Mahoney, Director of Nine Lanterns

Recently Nine Lanterns has had a new edition to its ever expanding family. We welcome Scott Mahoney to the NIne Lanterns board of directors.We look forward to passing on the benefit of Scott's involvement.

But, who is Scott Mahoney? Well, he is one of Australia's most seasoned eLearning and business analyst professionals. Having implemented eLearning in some of the leading medium and large enterprises, his experience will be a fantastic asset as we continue to expand our content, LMS and community platform offeringsd into the corporate market.

What have we been doing lately....

It would seem that we have been rather quiet lately. Well as is often the case, things are not as they appear.

We have been very busy on a number of exciting projects. Read on to find out more…

eLearning breakfast - why not come along?

We've been invited to speak at an eLearning breakfast put on by the eLearning Industry Association of Victoria (elearning.org.au). The idea, for Nine Lanterns, will be to present some examples of what has happened over the last few years to move our industry on; and to make a case for elearning finally coming of age. Come along and join the fun on 21 Feb 2008 (8am) - register here .

So, what is a Community Platform? And why should I be interested?

We have been getting inreasing numbers of enquiries about our new Community Platform (CP) - which is an evolution in many ways of the ageing Learner Management System (LMS).

Rather than deliver content and administer and report on learners (which is just about all that an LMS can do), a CP connects learners with each other and potentially, mentors, teachers, colleagues, managers. All in the belief that as learners, we are likely to learn more purposefully and more completely by and through, chatting, asking questions and giving answers to others. All at the time we need to learn - like, when we have a real, workplace, problem to solve. Not when some manager thinks it's about time we 'learnt' something and hey, this course looks really good (and pretty cheap) so why don't we go on it..?

Nine Lanterns - what's in a name?

We often get asked about our name, Nine Lanterns. So I though it appropriate to offer a range of explanations... But only one is true - email us the correct answer and you'll get a surprise gift by return...

Virtual worlds - relevant to business, to training?

Brandon Hall has just released a not-very-useful (but still very expensive) overview of the value and place of Virtual Worlds (Habbo, Second Life) in business and more particularly in training. Not so useful because they restate much of what is already known about these worlds; and because their thin'ish report (31 pages) is more descriptive than analytical or pragmatic (how can I apply this to my own organisation?).

Much more useful will be to keep a watching brief on the application of these worlds by major organisations - such as Telstra and IBM, both of which have invested significantly in the development of organisational spaces and even in micro economies, in Second Life for example.

Educational software research project with University of Melbourne

Nine Lanterns has been working with Melbourne Uni PhD candidate to assess the effectiveness of our educational software.

Social networking and its impact on education and corporate learning

Working with education.org.au and education.AU we were privileged to bring Danah Boyd over from the US to talk about her research into online Social Networking. Danah highlighted features these networks have in common.

What are clients looking for in an elearning Content Authoring System?

According to the Brandon Hall research it appears the top 5 business and technical requirements from clients (mostly US) when looking for elearning content authoring tools are:

1. Novice friendly, yet still has underlying extensibility for complex interaction types.

2. No plug-in required (with the exception of Flash output).

3. Adherence to SCORM specification and AICC standards (the real need is full interoperability with many LMS solutions).

4. Short learning curve for new content developers.

5. Extensive library of very interactive question types (beyond multiple choice and true/false).