Well I haven't been here in a while. (LMS, Intranet, New House, Oh my)

So much is going on right now I haven't been around here in quite some time. Work has me so frazzled that my moment, today I think will have to be a bit of a rant.

The small team I've been working on has been madly trying to find all the bugs, kinks and errors that are ever present in our new intranet and document management system. Of course just as we think we've identified one problem and sent it to the vendor to fix, we find another. We're really close though and have married ourselves to going live June 3rd. Matt, Sandra and I have our fingers very tightly crossed and a bottle of vodka near by just in case of an emergency.

I've been going crazy trying to populate not only my department's pages for the intranet, but also all the material for the education section. One day the education section will be the LMS, but until I get that sorted out I've been forced to put every education event I could get my hands on in as an individual page. I sent out a mass email to the organization asking them to fill out a spread sheet with information on the courses/training they provide. I want the intranet to be a one-stop shop for finding all education opportunities the hospital offers. However, I guess the spread sheet (driven directly from fields in the LMS) was too complicated. Go Figure!

I then set a second mass email telling staff to send me the flyers they've already created for training events. What do you know....a better response. So my education catalogue slightly resembles something that a staff member may search through to find a training event. I think it will take them a great deal of time to search through, but at least it is a start.

As for the LMS. Where do I start!?! I've had a meeting with the company that they want to start planning exactly how we are going to roll out the product, populate it with data, etc. etc. That was suppose to be last week. The intranet, not yet being live, has set me back a bit again with even starting the project. My supervisor flip-flops each day in support of ditching the LMS and finding another (my preferred choice, but now feel every choice is doomed).

I've started yet another college course. Back to the beginning of a certificate. I'm hoping this school doesn't drop the certificate before I finish as did the last institution.

Finally, life has been wonderful in giving me a new house in 10 more sleeps. It's about 20 minutes from where I currently live, but it's one of those "if you live in this town, you don't want to move to that town, it's not nearly as good" situations. I've been jaded since a teenager and need to get rid of the bias of the new town. Funny how these thoughts get implanted into us when we are young.

I'm sure there's much more since the last time I wrote however, all of this has kept me from writing here as I should and from sleeping at night.

My First Second Life Education Experience

I've been experimenting more and more with Second Life and now have my character looking more and more like a real person and less like the initial choices offered to first time users. I'm hooked on this silly thing. I explore all over the place and just this weekend was riding and Orca Whale, Parachuting, and Surfing. Wow I'm so virtually exciting.

I've been searching around for something educational to do though and hadn't yet found anything that really piqued my interest or was like a virtual classroom/discussion. That was where I had set my sights to start. Well today I finally found something.

I'm currently sitting in with NASA leadership, astronauts, scientists, and engineers along with local business, technology and academic leaders and local, state and federal officials discuss the role of space exploration in advancing science, engineering, technology, education and the economy that benefits your community and the nation. Sounds pretty cool.

(If you can see me, I'm in the second row of chairs to the left of centre, behind the guy with the red shirt. I'm the one with blue hair.)

Well it turned out it wasn't a presentation or lecture, but was an open forum. I can't say I understood or could follow all the lines of thinking that we going on as the discussion continued in just text form. Each person who wanted to join in the discussion would just type freely and their thoughts would display in the "chat" area.

It was certainly a neat place to start off to see the some of the potentials of learning in this manner. It was certainly an extremely more interesting and attending keeping method of group discussion than many of the chart rooms and discussion boards I've had to participate in for online college classes.

I shall continue my quest to find a "conference" kind of learning event.

We're Sticking With the LMS....So What Now?

I know a few have been following my LMS journey regarding trying to get it up and running and functioning. Last week I put a call out looking for any help I could in figuring out exactly what pieces I need to look for in an LMS as I wasn't sure mine has what I need. (Thanks again to all who helped).

Well, after a meeting on Monday (which I lost much sleep over) we've decided to continue down the current LMS road. I was really hoping to go with another system, but working in an Ontario Hospital we are limited, as most would be, to a certain amount of funding. If we decide to choose a different product 1) we'd have to find the funds somewhere in the budget [good luck], 2) we'd have to start the whole RFP process all over again [must follow politics], 3) it would take months to accomplish.

So, the vendor came in on Monday and demonstrated version 4 of the LMS....nice I've only been able to see version 1. There are some nice tweaks to the system, however there some significant reporting options that still need to be implemented. I'm happy that they are willing to run with any suggestions I put forward.

I think I've come to a comfortable place (or a delusional place - depends on your perspective) where I'm ready to push forward and make it work one way or another. At the least we have a fairly robust system, considering it's price, that the vendor is willing to work with us to make even better. The system may or may not meet our needs after a few years, but at least we have something that we can utilize, get our staff comfortable with the idea of an LMS, and see how well it is adopted by all before we go to something more expensive. It may actually work out to be the perfect solution and we never have to go to something else. (Wow did I just look at the cup half full????? That's a first).

I Love My Blog Community

I just wanted to give a thanks out to everyone who contacted me an offered their help over the last day. I was fortunate enough to get responses from a few people I have "worked" with in the past. Even more so, I was greatly surprised to have so many new people contact me and offer their expertise.

I love my blog and all that it has given me over the past year. It's amazing how sharing a little knowledge with others builds such a great virtual community and support network among peers.

If you haven't yet begun your own blog, I really suggest you start giving it a try.

Thanks very much to B.J., Christy, Mike, Ena, John, Terry.

LMS Assistance Needed if You Can Spare Some Time

I have these 2 checklists that were given to me of certain aspects to look for in an LMS. There is a column for required, optional, not required. I'm pretty sure I can go through the list and figure out what I truly need and what I can live without, but as peers that have actually lived with and worked with LMS's I was hoping you could take a look through the lists and perhaps give me hand as to what you think should/could/doesn't need to be there in order for me to really have it function. This way I will know much more soundly if I am on track requesting the pieces I think I should have.

Our background is:

• 2500 staff - growing to 2600 probably in 2-3 years
• 10-15 different job types (nurses, admin, physiotherapists, pharmacists, cleaners, etc) - actually captured as 700 difffernt roles within the hospital
• 15 Nurse Educators (probably will manage the LMS for thier staff) - eventual SMEs80
• Mangers (doing the same for staff)
• 1 Admin (me)
• Primary focus is for tracking enrollment, certifications, recertifications, what they are taking classroom, online, external (colleges)
• Online courses will be a secondary phase and we may create internally, maybe outsource courses

If you have anytime to take a look at the checklists I would greatly appreciate the help as there is not really anyone here I can turn to for assistance. Ideally I need them back by the end of tomorrow (Wednesday, May 7th) - any time tomorrow though. I have a meeting with my manager on Thursday. But even before Monday, May 12th would be appreciated as well.

I'm truly sorry to ask as I'm sure everyone has a ton of work on your plates already...doesn't everyone. However, I greatly appreciate anything you can do for me. If you can help please contact me and I will forward the checklists to you.

Sharing web tools with colleagues

I'm doing another short presentation to a network group I belong whose members are primarily in training and development. This group, however, does not have a large knowledge base of many of the web 2.o tools that are out there or some of the ways in which they can be used within organizations for simple collaboration and sharing of ideas.

I'm going to reintroduce them to wikis and blogs and I have discussed these before with them. I am also going to show a few mind mapping tools, social booking marking, and a few survey tools.

I've tried using each of these in various ways, attempting to get my supervisor and other management team members more intrigued by the value that they can bring to the organization. For the most part they are receptive at first, but then do not continue to utilize the tools. Unfortunately this is huge, if not the largest means by which these tools succeed. Web 2.0 tools appear to work the best when people use them and expand the "knowledge" that is with in the tool. This can be files, photos, music, data, and more.

I'm going to show and example of a wiki being used to gather survey data prior to a management retreat. I just set up last week a wiki for sharing files for our retreats to the management team. These would include agendas, location maps, photos, evaluations, and any handouts for team retreats that we may not necessarily want the general staff to view. Finally, I'll be sharing the use of a wiki for collecting knowledge into a form similar to a database. I blogged earlier in the year about trying to find something similar to KBpublisher. Instead I used a wiki with a password (wik.is) to recreate the same database that the customer has set up on their website. I could add answers to group posted questions at any time and the advantage with the new knowledge database being a wiki was that all the users could continue to expand on the data that was stored.

I'm also going to show a blog being used as a newsletter. This is not a new concept for anyone in the blogging world, but may be for my audience. As well as just explaining how it is a great way to capture your own personal knowledge as you work through a project (ie: my LMS journey).

I'm going to show event planning using a mind mapping tool. One that I am fond of is mindomo.com. I'm not a fan of checklists but in creating a mind map of all the items that we needed for an event we hosted last month it didn't seem like such a challenge. My colleagues could also go in at any time and expand upon the items I had captures. I also created one of these late last year to capture new ideas for running our orientation sessions.

I'm going to touch on social book marking as I'm still new to all of it myself. I love being able to get my bookmarks from any computer in the world, but I am still learning more about sharing with others and collecting bookmarks from others. I'm really interested in getting our management team to use Diigo. Christy Tucker got me into using it and I really like the fact that you can create a group of users that can collect bookmarks together. I just need to get this project started at work.

Finally I am going to remind them of survey tools such as SurveyMonkey.com and Zoomerang.com. We use these quite frequently at work to gather data. Usually they are for facilitation evaluations, but occasionally the are used for more intense data collecting as well.

I'll be happy to share my slides on slideshare.net as soon as it is finished and presented this Friday. The slides are mostly just screen shots so that I don't have to rely on making sure I have a great internet connection at the presenting facility.