teach, test, assess, and prescribe
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Pilot Online Learning
creates eLearning products that teach, test, assess, and prescribe.

PILOTed Newsletters

PILOTed is a monthly newsletter on online learning. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter or writing an article, send an email to mitch.weisburgh@pilotonlinelearning.com.

06/2006 Can we learn faster and accomplish more with mutual learning? This is an interview with Jim Oher, who explains how mutual learning diffuses potentially stressful situations so that they contribute to learning and results.
03/2006 When kids teach educators about educational software. Farimah Schuerman writes about how kids evaluated 13 educational software titles, and what they told educators about what they wanted.
01/2006 How to publish a great textbook.This month’s newsletter is about the process of publishing textbooks. We interviewed David Brake, CEO of Content Connections. David advocates a four-step process: Concept, Evaluation, Competition, and Adoption Potential.
12/2005 What do kids do on computers?: The 2005 ECAR (Educause Center for Applied Research) Study of Students and Information Technology depicts how college students use technology today. In this issue of PILOTed, we interviewed Robert Kvavik, a co-author of the study, to go behind the published report.
11/2005 Navigating 21st Century PreK-12 Market Opportunities: Simbanet’s Voyage to Achievement: Navigating 21 st Century PreK – 12 Market Opportunities was a great conference. There were very interesting speakers and I learned a lot. Even though this newsletter is pretty long, my original notes are more than twice as long. If you are interested in Simbanet conferences or newsletters, the URL is www.simbanet.com.
10/2005 Learning and the brain: what can we learn from what we now know about the brain. Over the past year, I’ve seen more and more references to “scientifically based learning” or techniques that purport to incorporate the latest findings from what we know about the brain. So I’ve been researching what is known about the brain and how that could be applied to education and learning.
09/2005 There are a plethora of polls and statistical data about how US schools compare internationally. But over the past few years I've spent time with quite a few foreign high school students who come to the US to study for a year. What are the differences when students are looked at as individuals?
07/2005 What you probably do not want to hear about testing and assessments: many who should flunk pass, many who should pass flunk, and there are more accurate ways to find out if someone knows something.
06/2005 Does training have to play a secondary role for an organization or is it something that can have a direct impact on strategy and organizational success? Darleen DeRosa and Alan Siegel of Right Management and Tina Busch of Pitney Bowes discuss how they took training requests and transformed them into interventions that had substantial measurable impact across the organization.
05/2005 The US Education Department has requested that schools use educational products that are based on scientifically based research. This month's PILOTed explores how one small educational publishing company went about proving that their products work.
04/2005

How do you get the right content developer for the materials you want to create? This issue of PILOTed will help you ask the right questions and make a better selection.
03/2005

What's happening with Ed Tech? Are we ensuring that the best products are going into the schools or are we just handcuffing educational publishers with red tape? Are we making schools focus on what is important or are we preventing them from accessing the technology they need to improve?

These were questions that were explored by the Software Information Industry Association in a dialogue with representatives from the Department of Education last week.

02/2005 Technology and Education; what is to be done? An Interview with Susan Patrick. Director of the Office of Educational Technology in the U.S. Department of Education.
01/2005 Is podcasting the next new big thing?
12/2004 An interview with Lauren Supraner on language and communications issues around multiple cultures, especially in the US.

What are the four reasons that this problem is not temporary and won't just go away? Why can't we just teach everyone English? What's the most common mistake well-meaning people make when dealing with different cultures? What niches are most ripe for acculturation training?

Find out what Lauren has to say in the attached December, 2004 issue of PILOTed. Feel free to reply and send comments.

11/2004

There are two articles in this newsletter. The first is an interview with Dick Methia on Testing, Assessment, Schools, and Kids. Dick is very well known nationally is the areas of education policy and school leadership.

The second article is on leadership development. Some questions to consider: can leadership be taught? what are the attributes of a good leadership development program?
10/2004 This newsletter is a discussion with Irwin Kirsch on ICT literacy, inequity, and measurement. Irwin is the Senior Research Director and Director of the Center for Global Assessment at Educational Testing Service.
07/2004 This is an interview I conducted with Mike McCurry and Andrea Taylor on the digital divide, equity, and e-government. What is driving the changes toward e-government, what can e-government do for us and how do we make sure that everyone can use it to solve their problems?
06/2004 Online learning can start with the very young, although sometimes this is viewed as a controversial topic; perhaps young children should be doing other things than learning on computers. Joel Josephson has started to conduct research into the effectiveness of online learning with children of different ages.
05/2004

This issue of PILOTed has two articles. Dr. Pauline Mosely is assistant professor of computer programming at Pace University. Dr. Mosely has written on how computer programmer training is changing rapidly in order to meet the needs of new languages and applications. Go to Mosely

Mitch Weisburgh interviewed Dan Throgmorton about the issues that Dr. Throgmorton is facing as he is re-educating adults who have been left behind in the technology revolution. When we think of ICT Literacy, we often visualize children in schools, but there is a large disenfranchised adult population, both in the US and around the world. Go to Throgmorton
04/2004 This month see what over 25 experts had to say on the strengths and weaknesses of K12, Higher Education, and Adult Learning. What areas are growing? What are the biggest needs? Who is having the most success?

These are summaries of the presentations I attended over a three day period at the Institute for International Research's Educational Industry Investment Forum.
03/2004 The March 2004 issue is an interview with Dr. Alfred Bork, Emeritus Professor of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. For over 30 years, Dr. Bork has been using computers to teach people languages, physics, math, reading, and a host of other topics. He fervently believes that effective use of the computer can introduce every person in the world to 21st Century skills.
02/2004 The February 2004 issues is a recap of the Information Industry Summit in New York on January 27, 2004. The general trends of the summit were that general content online has become a commodity and that the growth of the information industry will be in new products and services. It was also interesting to note the similarities in what the companies that successfully rode out the last two years (see Lessons Learned) say are their keys to success and the traits that customers say (see How Buyers Drive) they use in their buying decisions. You can download a PDF of this newsletter here.
01/2004 January 2004 issue: Interview with Bernie Trilling of Oracle's Think.com about how to think about the changes we need for our school systems in order to give kids 21st century skills. Bernie talks about transition from the Industrial Age to the Knowledge Age, and has coined the term seven C's in addition to the traditional three R's.
12/2003 December 2003 issue: Interview with Andreas Schleicher of the OECD on the impact of education on developed countries. He maintains that the right skills can propel a whole nation forward, while the demands of the 21st century could have ominous affects on developed nations if their educational systems do not change.
11/2003

November, 2003 issue: different types of online assessment and how they are used, originally published in Upside magazine of the Software & Information Industry Association: www.siia.net.

Also in November is an interview with Ferdi Serim on Infomation and Communications Literacy in our schools. The transcript of the interview is here. The interview can be heard at the ICT Literacy site at http://home.learningtimes.net/ictliteracy, registration is required (there is a button for new members to register), but free.
10/2003 October, 2003 issue: who makes the decision to use a training or educational product? How do you convince them to use your product?
09/2003 September, 2003 issue: designing effective training, issues to consider when creating eLearning.
07/2003 July, 2003 issue: how to document what experts do. The use of design patterns in order to capture best practices and methodologies.
06/2003 June, 2003 issue: expertise. What is the difference between people who can perform certain tasks expertly and those who seem to struggle? And what are the implications for training and education?
05/2003 May, 2003 issue covers the New York City Corporate Mentoring Program, a way for corporations to make a difference in the lives of the next generation.
04/2003 April, 2003 issue: Summary of the SIIA Conference on Funding for the Education and Training markets.
03/2003 March, 2003 issue: Summary of the CoSN Annual Conference, featuring research on how kids use technology in school, finding information about school use of technology, and a debate of where education is going with Seymour Papert of MIT Labs.
02/2003 The February issue: follows the debates on the ICT Literacy Summit on education and technology.
01/2003 The January issue: common problems with online learning which can be traced to the learning system design.
12/2002 December 2002 PILOTed newsletter.