Discovering Your Brand

I saw that Christy Tucker was working through Michele Martin’s Web 2.0 Wednesday task to discover what was her personal brand. I loved the word cloud she showed using Wordle so I too gave it a try.

Michele suggests that the top 5 words should give you a picture into what brand you are portraying and to think about if it is truly what you want to concentrate on.

Mine seems to be LMS, Learning, Know, and Training. I know that LMS has been my focus over the last year and is the subject of many of my posts, but it is not because I want to be branded as such. This is just my primary concern currently and therefore the item that I post the most about and look for feedback on from peers.

Can a word cloud truly project your brand? Perhaps, it certainly would reveal the focus of your blog. Cnn's cloud currently looks like this (http://www.cnn.com/)

This wordcloud wouldn't surprise anyone given the current news. I think the use of a cloud definitely can help a blogger to pinpoint the subjects they are posting on, but you will need to discern if you are looking at your current focus or your brand and are you content with either.

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.

Blog Day - Whoops I'm Late

BlogDay2007

Well I completely missed Blog Day, until my newest blogging friend (Christy) linked me on to her Blog Day roll.

I'm making a note though to make sure that I participate fully next year in this. Catching up after a long weekend is making my head spin.

The instructions apparently are....
1. Find 5 new Blogs that you find interesting
2. Notify the 5 bloggers that you are recommending them as part of BlogDay 2007
3. Write a short description of the Blogs and place a link to the recommended Blogs
4. Post the BlogDay Post (on August 31st)
5. Add the BlogDay tag using this link:http://technorati.com/tag/BlogDay2007 and a link to the BlogDay web site at http://www.blogday.org/

Blogs I've learned a ton of information from:

Christy Tucker - Experiencing E-Learning

Angela White - A Nice Cup of Lizard (fairly new to blogging, we started roughly the same time, is begining to implement an LMS, we are roughly starting on this at the same time too)

Cammy Bean - Learning Visions (I love Cammy sense of humour, she's almost a year into blogging - Sept. 28th - I think I've learned something new from her each week)

Cathy Moore - Making Change - Ideas for Lively Elearning (I stumbled on Cathy recently and I love all the tools and tips she keeps sharing with the blogosphere)

Big Brother 8 - Okay this one is just for fun....but I cant' help it...I'm addicted to the show. Go Evil Dick, Go!

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)