Bloggers Need to Watch for Malicious Fake Posts

BBC News is reporting today that several blogs through Blogger are being "hijacked" by hackers. Hundreds of blogs have been attacked with fake posts. These postings look normal, however they contain links to what resemble YouTube links or software testers. These links when clicked on then allow the hackers to access many files within you computer including saleable information.

It is unsure, currently, how they are obtaining access to post to the blogs. One potential way that is being considered is the feature to email posts to one's blog.

Please be sure to check your own blog routinely.

What's Your Best Web Source for Info

Business Week is compiling its best of the best for 2007. It's looking for the top sites where we, the users, get our most compelling information.

There are several categories to choose from and there is offer to add to the list as well. Categories include Best Blogs, News, Finance, Travel, Games, Mashups, etc. The polling closes September 10 and results will be posted at the end of September.

Make sure to add your favourites into the list.

Good Advice for Solving Problems

Lee Lefever posted a nice piece last night on their experience at Common Craft Show regarding producing their many fabulous videos on RSS, Social Bookmarking, and etc.

Some great advice that really struck for me when considering our upcoming LMS implementation was:

"If you're about to start something new, don't spend weeks trying to make the first attempt perfect. Get started as quickly as possible and learn as you go. Tinker, experiment and look for the big things you can tackle as you go. Solve problems when they need to be solved and you won't feel as overwhelmed by all the things that could be fixed."

I think I've been a little wound up thinking about getting the Cadillac version out there for our staff to really get excited about it, but at this point I need to realize that a Vespa will do. We have nothing right now so anything that gives staff easier access to course registration and material is going to be better.

Howtoons - cartoons showing how to build things.

Howtoons is a great site for kids to take a look through. It has lots of colourful graphics that look like modern day comics. Oh but wait...what's that you see....learning. Uggg, children tricked the world over to learn something hidden behind 1000 colours and images jumping out at you from the page. Ha...how diabolical.

This one is actually quite beautiful. It simply and elegantly shows how to create a pinwheel.

There are other toons on how to build soda pop submarines and learning about the Beaufort Scale. The blog section takes readers further out to the web to learn about tonight's lunar elcipse and tons more.

Howtoons are cartoons showing kids of all ages "How To" build things. Each illustrated episode is a stand-alone fun adventure accessible to all. If you are and adult and want to learn more about them (no pictures, just words and reading...yes...I know...how lame) click here.

Go ahead, share with your kids....trick them into learning something new.

A Closer and More Detailed Look at the Moon

Imagine being able to view up close and in high detail photos of the Moon that were taking during the Apollo 15, 16, and 17 missions. Now you can. Many of these photos from the 1970 are being scanned by Arizona State University, Geological Sciences Program. The resolution is at 14 bits (16,000 shades of grey per pixel).


(Image: AS15-96-13093research: David Woods)

Many of these photos have been kept safe in a freezer by NASA to preserve their quality over the last 30+ years. There are hundreds of photos of all the missions to be found at the Project Apollo Image Gallery.

The BBC News reports that:

"Prof. Mark Robinson (the principal investigator) said that the scanned images
were of such fidelity and precision that stereo measurements could be made where
the images overlapped - and therefor a follow-on project will be to make
topographic images of the Moon."

Another use for old books

Following on the heels of the Great Textbook debate....I found this today. If we refuse to allow other students to get some use out of old text books, why not turn them into art.

(Artist: Su Blackwell)

Karyn Romeis' African School Tale (textbook debate)

I usually just use the share feature of my reader to mark items that I like and want to share with others. Today however, I really want to point this posting out to everyone.

Karyn Romeis has been following and commenting on the textbook debate. Today she apologized (far too many times, lol) for what she thought was a long posting about her personal account of an impoverished African school - Once upon a Time in Africa.

It is something anyone who is even remotely concerned/interested in education or has a child in a school system any where in the world. It's a great reminder to us all of what we have and makes us think how we can help others.

Thanks Karyn.

GeoDistance - How Far Have You Gone?

Read/Write Web had and interesting post that caught my eye today. SimpleSpark has a video of 5000 web 2.0 applications logos presented in 333 seconds. Cool enough, but SimpleSpark has new applications daily.

So I started working backwards in time and found one from yesterday. GeoDistance!!!! Oh this is so neat. I have wanted one of these for ages. I love to go biking, but how far have I gone when I go off on my adventures. Open up the application. Pin point your starting point, your end point and any point in between and voila. Now I can see that I've been biking 35km in one direction (and back). No wonder I'm tired at the end of my trip.

What a great tool.

Private Social Networks - not your daddy's Facebook

I suppose I'm not high class or connected enough to be one of the 260,000 elite members of ASmallWorld. It's a social network, much like Facebook, but you must be invited by trusted members.

Erik Wachtmeister founded ASMALLWORLD as a private online community for
like-minded individuals. Most networking communities are open. Ours is only by
invitation. Trusted members who have existing social networks of quality in the
real world extend the invitations. aSmallWorld offers a retreat that intimately
allows members to enhance their networks and to reconnect with old friends.

One of those....why didn't I think of that ideas, I could keep riff-raff out too.

LMS is here, now what?

So we got our LMS or so they say. I've yet to get my greedy paws on to it. Initial thoughts were....let's just get using it and start tracking some of the training and registration that is already going on within our facility. This quickly changed at the first meeting to a general discussion about what "course material" we were going to put on the system. There are a few government created courses (which I'm sure are fine) floating around that need to be put on, but the rest is all paper.

Is is fine to jump in with just putting up .pdfs of booklets that are currently circulating around this place? I'm sure it's a start, but is it really the image of this great new tool that we want to promote. Many of our staff have never seen elearning, but there are a great many that have been taking elearning courses through all sorts of colleges and universities and they do know what course should resemble.

I've got a meeting tomorrow to discuss "WHERE IS MY ROLE HEADING?" A great title for...we have more work for you, no additional resources or recognition, nothing is being taken off your plate, and don't even think of more $$$.

I certainly don't want to become incharge of just student data entry. I'll keep you posted....uggggg.

Elluminate Free Webinar's (and Edubloggerworld Kickoff)

So I'm looking around my Reader today reading up on what I have been missing out on over the past few days (mini holiday), and I come across Victoria Davis' Cool Cat Teacher Blog mentioning the EduBloggerWorld kickoff on Thursday. I see that she mentions that she is hosting a little Elluminate session on Thursday....I go over to Elluminate. Heard of it a billion times in my online courses, never participated, yet! I then did a quick search through the Events link to see if I could see her session.

No, BUT!!!!!!

There are 3 pretty neat and FREE sessions coming up by Lance Dublin.

Back-To-Basics: Developing An E-Learning Strategy And Architecture
Lance Dublin
2007-09-27
02:00 PM - 03:00 PM Eastern
Enroll now!

Back-To-Basics: Implementing E-Learning Successfully
Lance Dublin
2007-11-01
02:00 PM - 03:00 PM Eastern
Enroll now!

Back-To-Basics: Understanding And Applying Learning 2.0
Lance Dublin
2007-11-29
02:00 PM - 03:00 PM Eastern
Enroll now!

Blogging - Thoughts on copying entire posts

I've never tried to post directly from Google Reader so I'm unsure just exactly what Brent is commenting on here, but I'll give it a go and use his post as an example/test.

 

 

Sent to you by Tracy via Google Reader:

 

 

Blogging - Thoughts on copying entire posts

via Corporate eLearning Strategies and Development by Brent Schlenker on Aug 17, 2007

I'm constantly trying to figure out ways to make blogging faster for me. I see so much stuff that I want to share with the eLearning community that its hard to get all my thoughts into blog posts about it all.

I tried the email option from Google Reader which seemed like a great idea at first. I can scan the world and instantly post to my blog all from one spot. PERFECT! That's what I want to do. But then again...not so perfect.

The Google Reader adds a bunch of stuff to the email and that shows up in my post. Not so good. However, I'm all about the information getting to you...even if it looks a little sloppy.

My biggest problem is in my gut telling me that it just isn't cool to put another persons ENTIRE blog post into my blog post. Sure the Reader email feature adds the link back and all that stuff, but still...ya know? Very uncomfortable with it!

So, in a pinch under certain circumstances I will post via the gReader email feature. But I'm going to try and avoid it.

What do you think?

 

 

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• Visit the original item
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• Subscribe to Corporate eLearning Strategies and Development using Google Reader
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Blogging while listening to a webinar...oh and chatting

So my attempt to day capture notes while I participated in a webinar worked much better. I opened the browser full to see the slides of the presentation. Minimized my Google Notebook and placed it in the upper left corner of my screen where there was nothing relevant to the presentation. I was invited to chat during the webinar and opened gTalk, minimized it and placed it just slightly above the webinar chat.

Now all at once I could see the slides, take my own notes, see the participants' chat comment, and chat with a friend all at once. Wow. That was fun. Not only that, but I didn't get distracted with some strange formatting happening as I took the notes. Notebook gave me a very clean look (no extra line spaces) and I could format it how I wished to, save it in my notebook and copy/paste it into my Blogger post tool. Oh happy day!

Shifting from Content-centred to Activity-centred ID (Online Forum - eLearning Guild)

So I'm going to try this live blogging thing again as I am listening/participating in the second day of this month's Online Forum hosted by the eLearning Guild. I'm going to capture my notes this time using my Google Notebook. I found yesterday that during the first session (and the second and third...interupted..don't ask) as I was writing using my blog tool often extra line spaces are put in where I didn't want them and other mysterious editings were happening. This distracted me more then anything and I wanted to fix them right away instead of waiting until the end....So today I use Google Notebook. So far...so good.

For today's first session I picked:
Shifting from Content-centered to Activity-centered Instructional Design by Cynthia Russell, University of Tennessee Health Science Center & Allan Carrington, University of Adelaide & Tim Neumann, Institute of Education - University of London.

First: Kudos to Allan for staying up to 1AM to present to us from Adelaide, South Austraila.

Initial poll of group participants: The discussion will centre around LAMS and 95% of participants had never heard of it. 69% of participants were from the corporate world, 16% were from higher education. 80% of the group considered themselves instructional designers, 71% have taken online courses, and 48% have facilitated online courses.

Alvin Toffler: The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."

Activity Centred is focused on the learning
-active engagement
-many ways of knowing the material

Content Centred is focused on the teaching
-learner memorizes
-one way of knowing the material
-information equals knowledge

Activity Centred Instructor
-activities are there to support the learning
-helps students to develop their own ideas
-frames material to support the learners

Content Centred Instructor
-transmits information
-teacher gives the knowledge to students
-very theoretical

Activity Centred Learner
-learn through doing
-participatory
-problem solving

Content Centred Learner
-learn by reading
-individual focus
-learn now use later

Activity Centred Material Flow
-experiential
-cyclic
-negotiated

Content Centred Material Flow
-linear
-sequential
-directed

Activity Centred Assessment
-deep learning
-many perspectives on solution
-peer or self-evaluation, portfolios, projects

Content Centred Assessment
-surface learning
-solutions right or wrong
-multiple choice examinations

The need for the shift comes from having to accommodate a variety of delivery modes and addressing learner's needs (styles, literacy, etc).

LAMS - Learning Activity Management System - Video helps/forces you to shift to an activity base.
What can students do? How can they work together? Etc.
Teachers can put tasks together that students can do.
Collaborating with teachers and peers.
Capturing lesson plans to store and resuse and share with other teachers.

Teachers usually start with the content and then wonder how do we get the students into the content and comprehend it.
LAMS instead starts with the activities. It's a tool to help build curriculum.
The Gates feature lets you monitor the progress of students and help those that are behind, move activities around, etc.
The Branching feature will help teachers created scenarios.

Thanks to Brent Schlenker who found out during the session (thanks for chatting) that for 6 months hosting the cost is $595 for 200 users, 12 months is $995. It is open source software thought.
http://del.icio.us/AllanADL/elearningguild170807

Have you looked at eLearningPulse.com

I took at look at eLearningPulse.com through advisement from Cammy Bean. It is indeed a great little hot spot for:

"Your daily source for all things eLearning". This site provides free resources
to the eLearning development community, including news, discussion forums, job
postings, and more.

I agree with Cammy that there are several blogs on their news list that I do already subscribe to and a few I haven't looked into yet. Hopefully through "word of posts" B.J. and Ben will get more and more to create a great resource list. As Cammy also said the job list is really a neat feature.

Great work Cammy, B.J. and Ben!

Tracking Myself

After my posting the other day about how to track comments that I might leave or respond to, I was wondering how do I track if I myself get mentioned somewhere.

Thanks to some help from Brent Schlenker, I set up (extremely easily) Google Alerts for my blog url, blog name, and Me. Brent also suggested the use of Technerati for some of it as well.

Now I get email messages delivered whenever my name appears on the web. Which is often since when I post something it says "Posted by Tracy Hamilton."

I feel like Mr. Bean when he sends himself Christmas cards.

Confronting Instructional Design Myths (Online Forum eLearning Guild)

This was the opening session for this month's online forum Advanced e-Learning Instructional Design: New Techniques and Strategies (or WWKBD - what would Kevin Bacon Do a great joke if you were part of the session). Our presenter was Frank Nguyen, PhD. It was a really great presentation. Most participants knew if the myths were fact or fiction, but there was lots of great bits of information shared and was a good kick off to the day.

I'm going to try something new here (for me) and blog as the forum progresses, trying to capture interesting points of the talk.

Instructional design tends to be passed down from one practitioner to another. Key to design is evidence-based practices: Case studies, evaluation studies, empirical research,and meta analyses.

Myth 1:
Using technology for training can significantly increase learning (participants voted 50:50 fact/fiction)
Research Says:
All types of instructional media (cbt, film, radio, virtual, etc) no significant difference from a learning stand point. However, instructional methods can have a significant effect on the learning of the student. Instructional Media means less then the methods we use (see Christy Tucker's post on Online Networking in Courses) Point from participant "methods can be increased my the media available."
FICTION

Myth 2 (Field of Dreams - if we build it will they come):
When provided with information sharing technology, learners will naturally contribute (participants voted 92% Fiction)
Research Says(based on learning 2.o):
Little solid research here.
In regards to Distance Learning: Poll to participants: What do you think of discussion boards? Participants voted: 66% Tolerate them, 27% Love them, rest hate them
Research Says: Learners post no more then needed, participation declined on boards Success comes from managing class discussions, and keeping the discussions focused.
In regards to Knowledge Management side:
Challenges with KM tend to be...
Cultural - convincing people to volunteer knowledge, and share.
Managerial - change management, metrics of value.
Information -avoid overloading users, ensure data is correct.
FICTION

Myth 3:
Creating a learning environment that closely mimics a real work environment promotes performance (participants voted 86% Fact 9% Fiction)
comes from Adult Learning theory.Practice of this has effecting medical schools greatly. Two types of training here, one is traditional medical school and another following a problem based learning style. 35 different studies across 19 institutions. traditional vs pbl environments. With factual knowledge and exams the traditional method came out higher. As far as student attitudes towards training and on the job training, the PBL students were significantly higher (Veron & Blake 1993)
FACT

Myth 4: Developing training to cater to individual learning styles (poll stats, missed)
Research says:
Research is scatted here.There are so many different types of learning styles covered through many different theories ie: dunn and dunn, gardner, hill, kolb, etc.
FICTION

Myth 5:
Developing training to cater to different age groups can significantly increase learning (participants voted 73% Fact, 17% Fiction, 11% Don't know)
Mostly in the work force now Baby Boomers and Generations X & Y.Little research here in this space. (I would like to reference a great chart here on What People Are Doing?
DON'T KNOW

Myth 6:
Developing training to cater to different levels of expertise can significantly increase learning. (Participants voted 94% Fact)
Research Says:
Australia Unv of New South Wales (2003) Kalyuga et al, as you increase the instructional methods and material the novice gets better learning, the expert has a learning reversal effect. If instructing to a novice user, new to a certain piece of content, we should expend more effort on the content/invested time in ID. Expert users of the same material may only need a resource tool from the instructor/training.
FACT

Myth 7:
By providing learners with more on-the-job performance support, upfront training can be reduced (Participants voted 75% Fact, 22% Fiction)
Research says:
Gloria Gery (1995) states if the performance support is really well done then the employee can often begin performing really well on day one of a new job.Nguyen & Klein (2007) - Used 3 groups of people those that were trained, those that had Employee Support Systems, and those that had both. Those that had both had better attitudes and performance. Those with EPSS were slightly higher then those that only had training.
*FACT (somewhat true)

Paper Batteries The Way of the Future

This is just a really neat invention and the enviromental implications are wonderful. Professor Robert Linhardt, of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and his team have developed batteries made of paper. Although currently samples of the paper batteries are small, postage stamp size, they do produce enough power to illuminate a small light.

A great article about the batteries, their applications, and how they work can be found here through the BBC News.

Collaborative Presentations - Preezo

Our IT is kind enough to keep our internet channels running smooth all the time. One way they do this is to limit the size of attached files that we send out through email. Ah how nice of them....but last week when a particular presentation we had needed to be sent to someone outside of the organization...oh what can I do? Split it into 3 PowerPoint files. Ugg. How unprofessional does that look. "I'd love to send you that file Bill, but you'll have to splice it back together after you receive all the parts." (okay...granted the presentation did have a million photos in it, but still you get my point).

Or......"I was off to do a presentation downtown yesterday and I forgot my flashdrive with my slides on it. What ever will I do?" (wow, I am truly sarcastic today, apologies to all)

Preezo is a great little online tool that can help with both of these situations and more. It's a slightly less robust form of PowerPoint, but allows you to create your presentations online and collaborate with others through it's site. No need to worry about forgetting to take your flashdrive to a presentation. All that is needed is an internet connection. Rumour is that Google will have a similar application as well soon featured in their line of web office products.

Just What Is An Unconference & How Do I Host One?

I have yet to attend one of these, but I really would love to see one in action. (Still need to find that $million I misplaced so I can fly around to all the events I'd like to attend) Anyway...I followed this link via Stephen Downs of Ewan McIntosh's 10 Top Tips for Unplanning the Perfect Unconference. It's a great posting with great tips about hosting an unconference, but what I also like about it is that the tips are ones we can/should all follow for any event we are hosting.

The very first one is so simple and easy to accomplish. It's one of those, "Why didn't I think of that?" I recently just had a management retreat here at work and the feedback about playing music over the lunch hour was incredible. "It created such a fun and lively environment." "It felt like a real break in the day and like I truly was away from the office." Honestly, can you imagine how hard was it for me to put a cd on during lunch.

I love #6 too. It's like a (what we call here) a "parking lot" of ideas. Why not let people play with their Blackberries during these conference and add thoughts, ideas, questions to the topic at hand.

The whole thing is just a great little read.

Tracking Converstations/Comments

I think it's important in a learning, historical and social sense to keep track of comments or questions that I have posted on other blogs. I think this is the thinking for many bloggers and for me more so in the last few days as I have had several comments on my blog. My concern is that often there is no direct line of communication (no return email) to make sure the commenter knows that I have responded to them. I certainly hope they look back at the blog to see if I do respond though.

So with that I've been trying to get the hang of these comment trackers for a while and haven't seem to have a lot of luck with them. I tried CoComment a few times and just don't get the hang of how to set it up properly. I seem to be tracking threads of conversations that I never recall participating in previously.

After doing a brief search I came across a posting from Andreas Gohr and his blog splitbrain.org. His posting on Tracking Your Blog Comments recommend looking at co.mments.com. So I've given it a try.
I really like it. I have found it easy to use to capture my comments (I only have 2 currently, but gave it a couple of tests). My only issue is getting the html code that they provide for their widget into my blog. I can not seem to get it to work. So I have resorted to placing a link to my public comment tracking page. It actually might turn out to be a better idea instead of cluttering up the side of my blog with another tool.

Yuxt - Video Bookmarking

Okay, maybe you've seen this, but I thought it was cool. I came across today via David Airey's blog. I was looking at an example of typography videos that he was sharing. Then my train of thought went to what is there on elearning. Saw Mr. Stephen Downs. Then I tried Tony Karrer (no videos there yet of him). Tried Web 2.0. Then for some reason I went to Star Wars. That got me a great little Lego piece and a Monty Python meshed with Star Wars. And then I stopped as my train of thought was just getting weird.

If you want to see the bookmarking tool in action here is the link to this small collection O created today. It took me literally only 3 or 4 minutes to setup and create. Seems like a great resource tool to collect and share clips of with others. The key here though is the collecting.

http://yuxt.com/hamtra/hamt

Orientation Day at Work

Today I am stuck with preparing, organizing and facilitating orientation for new hires. The reason I say stuck is twofold. One, everyone else in my office is conveniently on holidays (I need to better plan my holidays). Two, we do the same old routine month after month, PowerPoint presentation after PowerPoint presentation, and paper copy after paper copy. Oh it is so dull. We are amazed time and time again that the staff that attend think it's great. They actually like it and say it is quite informative. We know it's boring. We know you want to fall asleep during the day. Please someone tell us so we can make a case to change the whole day!?!

Okay...well know one is saying it, but we're going to do it anyways. Our day consists of one speaker after another showing nothing but PowerPoint slides mixed with an occasional video now and then. HO-HUM. We know that the content is necessary, but we also know that the format is unexciting.

My team is going to have a brain storming session text week on how we can spice the day up and make it more interactive rather than such a classroom base format. One suggestion we've already bounced around is turning some of the content into a scavenger hunt. New hires will have info they need to find and clues about where to find it within the hospital. One idea I posed was to purchase (and we have a very limited budget) cheap digital cameras that the groups could take and go and find selected info, but take pictures as they find it. They could then come back and present their findings and photos to the rest of the orientation group. Another idea finds our new hires going to our intranet and conducting an electronic scavenger hunt of particular items we would like to teach them about.

We have seen examples in other facilities where participants play games, use scanners, ipods, etc. All in an attempt to make the sessions more exciting, engaging and interactive. We believe that this will become and increasingly important line to follow as more and more of our new hires are of the X, Y, Z generations. People that are more technically adept and less intriged when spending an entire day in a classroom based training environment.

I'll let you know what we come up with. Hopefully it will be something that is even more exciting for the presenters as well.

8 Things About Me Meme - My Turn

Thanks Angela White for the tag...it appears several people have been tagged for this particular meme.
First, the Rules:

1) Post these rules before you give your facts

2) List 8 random facts about yourself

3) At the end of your post, choose (tag) 8 people and list their names, linking to them

4) Leave a comment on their blog, letting them know they’ve been tagged

Now, the facts:

1. I've never known what I want to be when I grow up.
2. I love biking, but rough mountain biking where the trails I find are just slightly wider then my tires (hense all the bruises...lol).
3. A fairly new passion of mine is improv. I belong to the Light'n Up Improv Troupe and we do shows monthly.
4. I have 9,556 photos on my computer...figured it was time to start a photo blog "Discovery Through Photography"
5. I first went to university for computer science, changed majors to biology, took a year off, got an diploma in accounting, quit account nonsense after several years, worked in the ICU at the hospital for a year and now am in the Organization Development Dept in same hospital. That job has allowed me to get new training, certificates and move me towards an elearning career....of some sort...see POINT 1.
6. I love camping....I could go for weeks. Rough backpacking or just in a tent in a provincal park.
7. I love to craft. I can't draw or paint to save my life, but ask me to create something...ta da Booster Rocket, okay maybe that is a stretch.
8. I have a musical talent that I never tapped into or used. I should have taken guitar lessons when my mom wanted me to years and years ago. Could have been a rock star...see Point 1.

I'll opt out of tagging people as well as I think that several people who's blogs I read have already been tagged. Thanks for including me though!

New Photo Blog

After reading someone's goal of a photo a day, seeing some friends' photo pages (Angela White), and someone's photo blog (Bruce Kirkby), I wanted to create a collection of my own work. I love taking photos when I travel, on day trips, and of friends and family. I recently found out I have taken over 9,200 which currently only live on my computer. I want to keep collecting images that I find inspiring and share them with others, so I have created my own Discovery Through Photography. I hope you'll take a peek at it now and again.

Headlines That Got Me To Read More

Well a week off for me a short bit ago and catching up on emails, voicemail, meetings and life has put me a bit behind with reading my feeds. I thought since I am behind and some items I'll just post some of the headlines/links that I found interesting from the last 2 weeks.

Laser Printers a Health Risk? - Discovery
Finding a Use for Facebook - Wendy Wickham
Free eSeminar: eLearning and the Science of Instruction - B. J. Shone
In Box Zero - 43 Folders - Increase your personal productivity - Brent Schlenker
31 Days to A Better Blog - Cammy Bean
Booos and Yeahs - Coming Back By Popular Demand - Common Craft (made me laugh - yeah!)
Bebo helps student bloggers! - Judy O'Connell
Memes - why do we do them? - Karen Romeis
Search Mash-Ups - Mike Qaissaunee
Email a New Reader of Your Blog - Nancy White
Study: Food in McDonald's Wrapper Tastes Better to Kids - Stephen Downs (I heard this on the radio and thought - yep, makes sense)
LEGO turns 75 - MAKE Magazine
Egypt's Largest Pharaoh-Era Fortress Discovered, Experts Announce - National Geographic

LMS Project Finally Begins - LMS (Day 1 part 4)

The final piece of our kick off meeting for the day was the LMS. Yeah!!!!!! Can you see my happy dance!!!!

We didn't go into as much detail for our piece yet as it will be the final phase of the whole over all system. The intranet will go up as the main portal to all, then the documents is a huge issue and just has to be up next, and we will tie it all together. (They promise me NOVEMBER).
One of our biggest barriers to begin with is going to be importing all our staff's details. You would think this would be simple. The system that our HR department uses can easily make up an excel file with the name and employee number. Our issue comes from how we categorize staff. The only way we can sort staff is by pay code. The problem here is not everyone is directly paid by the manager they work under. Managers and staff relate to one another by reporting structure. For an example: Nurse Betty Smith is listed in the current system as: Smith/Betty/RN-Oncology, Nurse Sandra Jones is listed as: Jones/Sandra/Cardiac-Registered Nurse. If that doesn't make sense.....the real issue is I can't pull out all the nurses (they are labelled differently), I can't pull out all the oncology staff (they aren't always position/dept they maybe dept/position).

I recommend if you are going to get into something like this (even not, on a paper system it is still an issue) create an inputting guideline for your employees. Keep it consistent. Make it make sense.

We're now waiting for IT/HR to figure out how we are going to get the students (staff) entered in, my dept to figure out the roles of various staff (who will be our contributors), some material to start with (sample courses)....and then we go from there.

A very scary and daunting task, but I'm extremely excited none the less. One of my next roles is to sit down with my supervisor and figure out exactly what my role in all of this will be. Any advice here is greatly appreciated as I'll be a dept of one. Shall I concentrate mainly on the administration of the system, the creation of content and courses, or some of both.

Stay tuned for this continuing saga....

LMS Project Finally Begins - Doc Management (Day 1 part 3)

The second set of meetings for the project centred around the component piece that will manage our policies and procedures. Currently we have approximately 5000+ pieces of paper (I think) that represent our P & P within the hospital.

This has little focus within my position (nor do I want it to) but I did want to sit on the meeting to see what our LMS vendor was going to do for us and how the new document management system will help our organization's processes.

The process for implementation of this system will begin with the importing of all the current documents we have. The plan is to use text recognition software to scan in and capture the policies and procedures. If that does not work someone will have to manually recreate them (NOT ME!).

The system, once we get using it and set up our lines of policy approval, will then track a new policy, procedure, form, or other document from Author, to a DMS (document management specialist), to several committees and their members for consultation, then different approving bodies for final publishing. Documents online will be the current version while printed copies will have water marks on them notifying the user that is it not a current/working version. The system will also notify users of up coming documents that are up for review.

We are greatly aspiring that this new tool will allow us to have only the most current of documentation "floating around", will essentially eliminate the "floating around" notion and there will be one central location to find the files, that anyone can access them at any time, and that new policies or procedures do not take months/years to get approved.

Once again it will be great to see how this truly works in action.

LMS Project Finally Begins - Intranet (Day 1 part 2)

We have been using an intranet system that is loosely a bunch of word documents converted into html and posted up on one server. A few people have gone to the extreme of using Publisher so as to make the "pages" a little more exciting, but that is the extent of our current intranet.

Our new fancy intranet will more closely resemble a regular web page which is more familiar to everyone. Our vendor offers standard elements such as calendar tools, classified ads, employee directories, news and events, and quick polls. Adding many of these elements, some pictures, and allowing users (staff) to enter their own info into many of these tools will create a greater sense of community. We are also hoping that along with the 'sense of community', we will create better communication to everyone....and I'll digress here....we were a hospital of 750 about 7 years ago, we are now at 2400 staff and growing as a new cancer centre is built as well. One of our biggest complaints from staff is the loss of the small community hospital feel and the lost/miscommunication that goes along with a larger facility. We hope that their will be better communication from the top down and amongst departments individually. The ability of the staff to enter in their own classifieds (based on acceptable standards) and upcoming events will create a great sense of buy in from our staff. Time will tell for sure for all of these "hopefuls".

One of the first things though that our vendor will help us with before we even get adding content is to do the 80/20 rule with our Structural Site Map. This is basically the layout of our top tier categories that will be seen on the home page (i.e. HR, Directory, Education, Programs & Services, etc). Then the tiers that go under each of these are the components of these categories (HR - careers, employee wellness, benefits, etc) then so on and so on. Basically it covers all the category pages a user could navigate through.

What is nice here is that our support at our vendor LMS company will take our existing internet, and some other places to help set up this site map initially. This will then give us something to work from to build where we hope to go with the new intranet.

LMS Project Finally Begins (Day 1 part 1)

Tuesday was our first meeting with our LMS vendor regarding how we as an organization are going to develop and rollout our new intranet, content management system and LMS. Several key project leads from each of the three components were present and the fact that we will be the core group through out the entire project is apparently a key success factor. If the people at the first meeting are also the key representatives that will be there for the entire project process then this will ensure motivation among members, approval point people don't change, and synergy will continue through to completion.

The first part of our day consisted of going over a bit of a timeline that we hope will work out for the project. We are working with a guide of a 16 week rollout. Wow! That's great....(let's see what happens).

• Weeks 1-4 site structure development, staff databases created, some training
• Weeks 5-8 will see interface development/layout and beginning configuration
• Weeks 8-9 will have train the trainer and deployment to admin users
• Weeks 10-12 data migration will begin (docs, policies, etc)
• Weeks 13-14 final testing and Q&A
• Weeks 15-16 sign off by admin users and roll out to staff

Looks tight, but achievable if everyone does their part. So our meetings for the remainder of the day were broken into 3 parts:
Content Management - The Intranet
Document Management - our Policies and Procedures
LMS - our elearning management system

Environment Friendly Applications Hit Facebook - Zimride

I saw this fairly new application for Facebook featured in an article in the Toronto Sun today. It is called Zimride and is the product of 2 gentlemen (Rajat Suri - a local and Logan Green - New York) that met over the internet and became business partners. That alone is pretty neat right there, but what they have created is an application where you can meet and get to know others that may want to carpool with you within your driving area. That's a great idea considering one trip down the 404 from one end to the other (Newmarket, Ontario to Toronto, Ontario) and seeing countless single drivers all heading to the city for work. We just recently adopted carpool lanes on the highway....let's get using them!!!!

My LMS Journey Begins Tomorrow

So I go back to work tomorrow with the fear that I think I will have several hundred emails. I left in a rush and did not put on my out of office notice....uggg.

Mike Harttrup emailed me during the week to ask about my LMS adventure, how it will form, what it will entail, what issues, etc. will be encountered. I fully expect to be blogging much over the next several months in regards to the new system. I know that I have 3 or 4 meetings tomorrow. One will be our first meeting with our winning vendor. A panel decided on the product after several demonstrations over the course of (far too much) time. We had 2 products narrowed down by a core group committee based on needs identified by the hospital (where I work). These included a package that could deliver an LMS, Content Management (Intranet) and a Document Management System. I will have to refresh my memory at work to let you know who gave the second product demonstration. I was equally impressed by their product as well and think I was leaning my vote towards them (I love all the bells and whistles of things I may never need or use), however, our vendor was picked for ease of use by those that will me managing the components of the systems and for the users themselves. We have a high late-career population and want to make sure that they will be as comfortable going to the system for information and utilizing it as much as our new out-of-college hires. Money of course is always a factor in determining what a company picks and I believe both companies came in well within budgets, but it was the little add-ins that helped as well (doc conversions, etc).

So once my initial introductions begin for MY LMS (yes I want to believe it is all mine - insert evil laughter, lightening, thunder) I will be more then happy to share it all here for my continued learning and hopefully some of yours as well.

Let the games begin.

Holidays are wrapping up.

Well one of the hottest weeks of the summer is wrapping up here in Ontario and so are my holidays.

Some time at a near by provincial park (gov't camp ground) I and my friends were introduced to swimmer's itch. That was not fun. Because of the extreme heat around here for the last while the pollution levels in the lakes has risen and when the heat get's high and there is a lack of rain to move water around the lakes can be unsafe to swim in. An hour after getting out of what seemed like a wonderful day at the beach my friends and I all started commenting on how itchy we were. 5 Days later I have finally stopped itching but look like I have a small case of chicken pox because of all the little marks on myself.

Another day was filled with some friends at Canada's Wonderland. A near by amusement park. Let's just say a whole day of roller coasters and dropping 237 feet in free all are not what they use to be when I was a teenager. But it didn't stop me from going on all of the rides.

So a visit with family and an all nighter at the drive-in (okay 3 movies) finished off some summer holidays nicely. Now I can get back to blogging elearning stuff again.

Thanks all for baring with some personal details of my summer fun.