2008 Annual Gathering - looking for attendees

Angela White put out a nice comment today on how much last year's event meant to her and how much it enspired her personally and in a career capacity. I feel very much the same and feel quite privledge to be given the opportunity to be going again this year (BIG thanks to my boss).

Last year was quite exciting from the keynote speakers to the concurrent sessions, to the many new friendships I've acquired through blogging. Blogging was the most wonderful tool that I have ever learn in my life. I have learned so much though my own blogging and much more so through the reading of other's blogs.

I hope to meeting many fellow bloggers at this spring's gathering. Angela and I would both like to hear who else may be attending.

On to a New University and a New Certificate

Well, I was last year working on an elearning certificate from the Univeristy of Calgary. I was able to complete the core courses, however, they dropped the certificate from their roster and I have been unable to pick up the rest of the courses that I need.

I have just proudly enrolled into the University of Toronto and into thier Elearning Certificate program. I'm quite excited for many reasons. One is that it gave me a SUPER-GREAT reason to buy a new computer. That and the fact that a family member killed my old one. (I might even be actually able to get Second-Life to work on my computer now, I could barely get to the info screens previously). Second, is that the people in my class all seem to be really interesting, all enrolled for very different reasons, but all working towards something exciting in elearning. Third, it's just always fun to continue to expand your mind through new people, new experiences and new adventures.

I'm sure you'll all look forward to my papers required for these courses.

ZENN Cars - Zero Emissions No Noise (Canadian)

I found this extremely interesting and typically Canadian.

Someone shared with me a video from the Rick Mercer Report about the ZENN Car. This zero emission, zero Noise car is manufactured in Canada, sold all around the world, and if you can believe it....illegal to drive on Canadian roads.

The cars meet all transportation standards, however there are no laws regarding low-speed vehicles. Come on Canada....it's time to seriously help Earth.

Looking for assistance finding a knowledge database?

I've been given a question about someone's knowledgebase. On their website they have a link to a knowledgebase (or is it knowledge database?). They are a little unhappy with the format of the page that appears on their website and are looking for something new.

This is something completely new for me. I'm looking for any help that can be suggested on how to do this in the cheapest and easiest way. Members in this group post a question in their Google Groups page. Other members answer the question. Then another person (maybe me) takes those answers, compiles them into the knowledgebase. The kb is then accessible by a link on the website.

Is anyone aware of a simple to use web based applications that would manage this? Any and all suggestions are welcomed. I need to report back to them by January 30th so any help I can be before then is greatly appreciated.

OEDb Releases Online College Rankings for 2008

Every so often now I get a request to blog about various web tools and sites. (I must be moving up in the blogging world).

Today I had a request to take a look at the Online Education Database's 2008 College Rankings. Not being familiar with U.S.A. colleges/universities I can speak much to the precise content of the site. However, I am impressed with the way they have gone about creating their rankings.

They have used 8 different metrics: acceptance rate, financial aid, graduation rate, peer Web citations, retention rate, scholarly citations, student-faculty ratio, and years accredited.

Too many job roles is hindering the LMS launch

Well if you can believe this, my LMS (yes I'm calling it mine now) is still not quite up and running. We have a few issues with the deployment and I think I have already mentioned that one of them is the fact that the majority of our staff do not yet have a way to access it from home. Of course we don't have enough computers/kiosks internally for them to access it from either. So...we wait for the IT department to work on their "EMAIL FOR EVERYONE" project.

We've decided instead to start/aim smaller and use the LMS for registering and tracking education. However..... we have 770 different job titles within our organization. Very crowded, cumbersome, and difficult for the system we have purchased to navigate through. The thinking behind the billion different titles is that being in a health care facility we have, as an example, RNs (registered nurses) in every clinical area (say 30 areas), we then have fulltime, partime and casual RNs in each area (30x3). At this point I've already shown you a possible 90 different roles. Then then are technologists, unit clerks, clerical staff, professional resources, etc, etc, etc.

Now I have the task of trying to take the unique rolls within each department and see if we can try to narrow them down to more generalized categories. Our intent is that each category (with a dept) will have specific educational needs. For example all ICU RNs would take CPR, all Emergency Unit Clerks would take Computer Order Entry.

Too bad no body realized early in our history that we had sooooooo many rolls being created.

Have You Discovered - TED

I love looking through and exploring the various presentations that are available through the TED website. If you haven't yet taken a look please do. The filmed talks are fascinating and explore a wide variety of topics. Basically they flow around one of three ideas Technology,Entertainment or Design (TED). "The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes). " There are many, many speakers you've already heard of (Richard Branson, Bono, Bill Clinton) and there are many more that you should hear.

I watched another neat little video that was recently posted from a talk given in March 2007. Take a look at David Gallo's talk on "Underwater Astonishments".

WebStats 2007 - MEME

Tony Karrer started a meme on 2007 webstats on blogs. I started blogging mid April 2007 and began using Google Analytics in October. I certainly don't have the same number of visitors as anyone else I read, but I like to look every so often to see how my blog is received. Here are my stats from G.A. from Oct. on wards.

My stats from Blogcounter.com have me at 4647 hits since June 2007 and I've had visitors from at least 24 different countries. I love how easy blogging globally connects people.

eLearning Programs (referenced)

In looking towards improving and continuing my own education, I came across a great discussion from many readers on Tony Karrer's blog and wanted to draw some more reference to the post.

The post "Online Programs that Offer Training in eLearning? : eLearning Technology" had many comments with suggestions of schools in which to take elearning certification courses.

Women to Watch for and Read

I use a nice little feature of Google called Google Alerts. If you haven't discovered it yet, you can put various key words/phrases and if they come up during the day/week in blogs, videos, news sites, websites, etc., then an email is sent to your inbox as a notification. I have my name and blog set up this way and it lets me know if I get mentioned some where. (As a bit of a side note here...because I put in my name I get a lot of basketball articles...lol).

So why do I bring this up....Janet Clarey posted a wonderful comprehensive list last week called Recap: Women in the edublogosphere 2007. She very kindly included my blog in the list and my alerts let me know. Janet brings up a good point in that women bloggers tend to be a little less "HERE I AM" and she's taken it upon herself to help us all be heard. She compiled a great list of some very fascinating bloggers all of which are women (mostly education based), and all of which are worthy of taking a visit to their blogs.

Ready to Start a New Year of Blogging

Well I just got back from a wonderful and sunny trip to Huatulco, Mexico. I went down for a wedding, but more importantly a much needed vacation. I highly recommend if you can visit the area to do so. It was beautiful, even if it hadn't rain since October. The people of the resort and local town were incredibly friendly and if you like to barter there are some wonderful local crafts to be found. I really recommend renting a ski-doo and going on a snorkeling tour.

So, now onto an new year of blogging. How challenging is this going to be? Well as long as I add it into a daily routine (or weekly at least) it should be good. What I'm finding more challenging is keeping up on reading my collection of feeds from other bloggers that I enjoy reading and learning from. There is my resolution for this year...figuring out a better way to accomplish that. The last few months of 2007 proved to make that task very challenging. Along with a new year, comes a whole load of new work in my office as well. We tend to start up many new projects as a new year comes around. I've got staff satisfaction surveys to put out, core curriculum to administer and mark, a new intranet going up (luckily I don't have a big role in that), a new LMS system to figure out how to use and even more so how are we ACTUALLY going to use it, we have a large corporate wide training day, year ends, and then all the day to day activities that go on. Ugggg where does it end....maybe June, July...hmmm.

Well a very happy new year to all my blogging friends I hope you find this year wonderful, exciting, prosperous, challenging, full of fun, learning, and new adventures.

LMS - lingers on but isn't getting launched as hoped

Oh I was warned, but did I truly listen....I guess not. I've been putting off writing this post purely because of how discouraged I am at our entire LMS launch.

We have now been advised that the great change that was suppose to take our insufficient email to a whole new wonderful level, has in fact put us back right where we were. We were over capacity with accounts:server space. The new system and server were to fix this, but the new system has gone over capacity in a matter of months due to an unforeseen glitch (every time one sends an attachment organization wide...it gets copied onto the server X number of times...guess how bogged down the system is?).

So what bearing has this got on the LMS? Well, because of the server/email issues the organization wide roll out of email for all (and usernames/passwords) is not happening when expected. This in turn is blocking us from creating an extranet (intranet available at home) and that in turn is not allowing external access to our LMS.

We are now at a point of.....what now?!? We have a few options from which to choose.

1. We can use the system purely as a course registration and tracking system for educators and my department (Organization Development).
2. We can use it for point 1 + elearning for internal staff access only (limited students allowed to access)
3. We can purchase an external host to host the LMS giving all staff (home) access.
4. We can put off the launch until we are completely ready to go full out.

So we have many ideas which each have their positives and negatives. Frankly I'm a little overwhelmed and discouraged by it all. I've decided a holiday is the best way to cope with it all.

With that, I'm hosting one more education session in an hour for our educators and then I'm off for a week. Perhaps I'll have a brilliant idea while sipping fancy drinks in pineapples with umbrellas coming out of them. I shall continue the LMS saga shortly for you.

No need to spend money on computer software

Here's an article from a while ago, but lots of these products/sites are picking up more and more momentum.

How to Never Spend Money on PC Software Ever Again -- 11/3/2006 By Chuck Gray, CRRL Staff answerpoint.org

Welcome to 2008; let's start it off right with some free stuff

Stumbling around today I came across a Business Week article from Nov. 19, 2007 listing 101 of the best freebies to be found on the web. Some of my favourites ideas were:

• BBC Languages
• Sterling Silver Jewelery Club
• Free iTunes Downloads

But especially one that we can all "Click" and help out with The Hunger Site, where you just have to click to have the sponsors help donate to those in need around the world.