We'll be using Movable Type as our content production and management system. It'll be used to produce both blogs (though we won't call them that ... I know, I know) and stuff that is recognisbly online learning. Alongside that content, though, we'll use third party networking tools.
For the learner, it will feel to the user like a single site ... but it'll be three 'entities' each of which will have fuzzy edges.
Why are we doing it this way?
Well partly because we're starting from where we are and with the ambition that we have ... and somehow we have to weave the two together. Actually, this is more opportunity than challenge. A few years ago, we'd have built a couple of dozen interactive 'howto' modules in Flash with a 'how have you done?' test at the end and bingo. Everybody happy. No evidence, of course, that any of the learning would have made the slightest difference to anyone ... but learners would have done it, a box would have a tick in it etc etc. Now we know different - we know more about how career journalists learn and how they want to learn; we know the value of informal learning and networking. Ideally, we'd start from there - using powerful informal learning tools. But that's not how organisations work. For understandable reasons, organisations - especially publicly accountable ones - like tangible stuff, auditable stuff, stuff that shows compliance.
So, the answer we've come up with is a trinitarian one which offers learners different routes to that learning but which, crucially, allows shared informal learning from blogs and networking to develop more built learning. A bit like this:
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