m-Commerce

I started wanting to write about a few articles I have briefly skimmed over commenting on m-Commerce and the grand future that many believe it will have. I wasn't really surprised to see that China, Japan, India were big potential markets, but that fact that Latin countries were really took me by surprised. I certainly need to look further into this and find some money to start investing with.

No need to stand up from the computer

Trying to catch up on my reading (online of course) I came across a blog about an old commercial for an Atari home computer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryQZ9ZBD4rE.

Basically it the person was questioning how far we have come since this 1981 commercial and wondering if in another 25 years we'll be questioning "Why did we ever play the PS3? How ancient and rough all the graphics look." Ugg, remember centipede graphics?
Then I stumbled onto Virtual Me. A virtual world that Electronic Arts, the world’s leading interactive entertainment software company, and the Endemol group, a global leader in television and other audiovisual entertainment, will allow users to create likenesses of themselves to then use in online versions of Big Brother, 1 vs 100, Deal or No Deal and so on.
Sounds interesting. I love Big Brother, I want to go on the show, I could do it....or so I think. Now's my chance. Next should be Survivor. All these reality shows that just don't seem to go away no matter what the critics think will gain perhaps a whole new audience. Gamers.
I see kids using all sorts of little electronic toys (tamagotchi) and if they go online they get extra secret codes to plug back into the hand held game. Hand helds, tvs, groceries, everything we see, touch, use seems to have a www address somewhere that lets us expand our use, abilities and knowledge of the products. Everything exists in a virtual world too. If we could only figure out how to hook up the washroom to the computer then we'll be all set to never have to leave our computers again. Not even for 1 minute.

Introduction to Me!

My latest eLearning endeavour is "Facilitating Learning Online" and assignment 1 is to create a biography/introduction to myself. I decided that I also wanted to capture it here so that as I write where I have come from and where I want to go that I can reference back to it a year from now and see if I have indeed accomplished my goals for the year. Hopefully further into the future it will become a great source pride to look back to and see where I was and how far I have come. (When I saw that this assignment was to be 400-600 words I thought, what am I going to write....lots of slashing and several edits later I finally got it to just under 570...it was turning into a book.)

That all being said, my name is Tracy Hamilton and I live in Newmarket, Ontario Canada. I am currently employed as the Education Assistant in the Organization Development Department of Southlake Regional Health Centre. My department is responsible for much of the management training, staff development, team building, computer training, facilitating, and coaching types of activities that typically occur in corporations. We do not do the clinical training of staff as that is left to the capable hands of our nurse educators.

It's and interesting journey how I got to this position and the path that now lies in front of me. I graduated from high school unsure of what career I wanted, so I bounced around trying various majors of subjects I excelled in school. Computer Science was my first adventure at university and I may have been an executive at Pixar had I realized where animation was heading. Naiveties lead me to believe that a biology degree could only lead to the laboratory or a doctor’s office. Geography excited me greatly even though many would consider this subject sadistic and unfortunately I was convinced at the time that the only job I would find would be a weather girl. Mental note to grade school teachers, let students know all the opportunities and doors that can open from one small subject. I could have been an Egyptologist sitting beside Dr. Zahi Hawass discovering what is up the two secret passages from the Queen's Chamber of the Great Pyramid later this year. (March 20, 2007 Discovery.com)

I continued my educational journey progressing onward towards mathematics and I completed a 3 year accounting diploma with honours. Several temporary accounts receivable positions later I finally achieved permanent employment at a media production company which soured me enough to quit my job and dedicate myself to looking after my brother, who has cerebral palsy, for a year. Several months into my summer of fun with my brother a secretarial position came up at the local hospital in the Organization Development Department. My various background and job experience actually gave me a very rounded resume that allowed me to present myself as a jack-of-all-trades. I was successful in getting the job and since then have developed it into a completely new scope of work.

One day my manager told me something I found very provoking, "The years will go by no matter what you do, so you might as well have something to show for it when they are gone." (Janice Baynham) After she told me that I enrolled and completed, through online courses, my Adult Education - Staff Training & Development Certificate. With this new education behind me my manger was able to advocate changing my secretary position into an education assistant. The new found fascination with online learning drove me to now pursue a certificate in eLearning.

My goal now is to continue down this path of education and e-exploration. I am an active member in the eLearning Guild and recently attending their Annual Gathering in Boston. The wealth of knowledge I gained there was incredible and priceless. The people I met were so fascinating and inspiring that I am now determined to change my job yet again and develop it into a Learning Management Systems Coordinator. A little more training, developing and e-exploring I’m sure will get me there by the end of the year.

Update to starting a new course

So apparently this whole concept of a study guide is not as unusual as I suspected. 3 colleagues that are also taking online courses from 2 different universities also have had similar materials sent to them. I am very surprised. The whole concept is very alien to me. I am no stranger to online learning; this is my 12 course that I have taken with 12 different instructors through 2 different schools. This is the first time I have seen a course in this format. Everyone of them has been relatively similar and this one seems so unique to me.
Thankfully I think I have taken down my initial wall of fear and surprise and turned it into intrigue and inquiry. I now can't wait to see how this course progresses and unfolds. It will be more of a learning experience then I expected. Not only am I learning new course material, but also a completely new format for teaching online as well.

Just started a new online course

I just started another online course. This one in entitled "Facilitating Online Learning". I'm a little surprised to tell you the truth regarding the layout of this entire course. It is being completely presented in a manner I have never seen before through 10 other courses on various platforms. I'm most surprised or taken back by the fact that a course that is about facilitating online courses begins by having the students look through a 103 page study guide.

I'm open to trying to figure this all out, but from my recent studies and information I have collected at a recent conference this almost seems backwards from what is normally expected of online courses. By this I mean that information is normally broken out into several components so that you can quickly get to the info at any given time instead of having to flip through a large document. I am curious to ask why you choose the format that you have instead of individual accessible sections.

Please understand this is not a critique (not on day one) but more so trying to gain knowledge as to the methodology. As I stated this is the first time a course has been presented this way to me and it seems more of a paper based course instead of online info. I have a feeling I'm "reading" too much into all this as the ideas on online collaboration and discussion does represent the new trend in elearning.
I'm curious if anyone else in the class is surprised by the format/layout/documents or if I am the only one that feels a little out of place? It seems completely oxymoronic to teach a course about online facilitating by teaching it with a book.

We'll see what the teacher and students think. I may have put a target on my forehead day one. May be a little harder to get that A+ in this class.

Getting buy in and content

So I have the blog going. It's still just thoughts and tasks at the moment, but I want to expand that further soon. More into the whole PLE idea (and I'm going to link that to Stephen Downes as that is where I heard the term from).

I also have decided to currently use the Google Reader for my feeds for the time being. We will see how much I continue to like it, but for now it seems to serve it's purpose. Still working the all the functions of it and how to best, sort and tag items. Now to link in all the feeds I want to keep up on. Here is where I think I need to make sure I don't put in EVERY thing. Last time I tried one of these on my PDA I had so many topics to read, and then so many did pique my interest that I didn't get to much else in the work day.

I'm still shopping around for an easy to use wiki for my staff. We are in the beginning stages of LMS roll out and I also need to make sure whatever I go with will be able to either run within our LMS, be dumped in, or run outside on its own. So much for me to learn.

I've had great feed back on the initial wiki ideas from our CNO, my manger, a few of our late career nurses. Seems like it will fly. Here's hoping it just doesn't crash.

Let the Developing Begin

I'm quite excited today because my boss, who was so kind to send me to the eLearning Guild Annual Gathering, was also excited to hear about everything that I came back with.

My new tasks that follow in now behind this blog are to develop 3 wikis (perhaps blogs, but I doubt that will be the correct forum) for our new nursing students, our late career nurses and our nurse educators. I also was able to get approval from her to set aside large chunks of time to just concentrate on this elearning/lms initiative. NOW to get her to move on a new job title.

Anyone with a job description for an LMS Coordinator, etc type of role, that would like to share it with me (especially from a healthcare stand point) would be greatly appreciated.

Changing a Template

Well, well, how exciting that I now have a blog up and running with my very own template design. Okay, I really took one offered to me and tweaked it up a bit so that I liked the colours, fonts and such. Although it is amazing how much time you can take to get just the right colour combination, style, font size, etc. Silly really. So now I move on to the more exciting portion of our show...finding all the blogs, resources, and tools I want to read up on and learn about from the conference and expand out from there.

I can truly see how this is a process of trying and learning.

1st Post

Well I just got back from my first eLearning Guild Annual Gathering. Wow all I can say is what an amazing experience. I learned so much, met fascinating people, listened and learned from passionate people and now my head is spinning.

I generated so many ideas from the conference and from what I learned from various speakers. My first thing to do from my new book "1 Billion Things I Want to Accomplish" was to start a blog. So here we go. I've tried this a few times before personally and professionally, but not to a great success. Now after the conference I think I have a better appreciation for how I want to approach and utilize this tool. Side note here: I met someone who hates the word utilize....I should have asked him why. I'm going to use it here out of spite.

So off I go to begin my journey in the blogging world. My mission: since I've chosen to accept it is to, as I've titled this blog, just continue to discover the world around me through eLearning. Whatever form that may take. For now that is any electronic form that I find interesting and fascinating. It may narrow as time goes on, but here is where I start.

For instance: at the end of the conference we heard the closing note speaker Cecily Sommers speak on Brave New World. She was referencing a show on the Discovery Channel called Man vs. Wild. I found this interesting as I had been watching the show in my hotel room the previous night as well. So my discovery here about my world is: Should I get trapped in the middle of an African Savannah and I can locate a stream I should travel up stream to find civilization, not down and more often then not a river or stream just trickles into nothing and disappears into the ground. One is better to travel up stream and find the source.

So before I continue on my blogging journey into the known I'm going to finish my book "1 Billion Things I Want to Accomplish" with the ideas and references I gathered from the conference. I've made some notes on things I want to blog about. There are some key people from the conference I want to tap into their blogs. Get my rss feeds more relevant instead of just the silly content I have in them now (although knowing exactly what is happening on the Harry Potter next movie set is hardly silly). And we'll go from there. I'm going to strive for at least a posting a week, that seems reasonable, but we'll see if that is enough.