The Price to Buy 12 Days of Christmas

From article out of the Toronto Star, Dan Nephin (Associated Press).

Shopping list
Prices of items in the Christmas carol "The Twelve Days of Christmas," according to PNC Wealth Management:

1 Partridge, $15 (last year: same)
1 Pear Tree, $150 (last year: $130)
2 Turtle Doves, $40 (last year: same)
3 French Hens, $45 (last year: same)
4 Calling Birds (canaries), $600 (last year: $480)
5 Gold Rings, $395 (last year: $325)
6 Geese a-Laying, $360 (last year: $300)
7 Swans a-Swimming, $4,200 (last year: same)
8 Maids a-Milking, $47 (last year: $41)
9 Ladies Dancing (per performance), $4,759 (last year: same)
10 Lords a-Leaping (per performance), $4,285 (last year: $4,160)
11 Pipers Piping (per performance), $2,213 (last year: $2,124)
12 Drummers Drumming (per performance), $2,398 (last year: $2,301)

My sister was quite surprised that 10 Lords a-Leaping was cheaper then 9 Ladies Dancing....oh no...I hope I'm not getting 10 Lords a-Leaping for Christmas....where would I put them?

Yes Virgina, There Are Other Search Engines

A co-worker of mine (the one that went to India, who I'm still trying to convince to blog) is working on a course that discovers various ways to do literature searches for research among other things. Every so often she comes across a great "new" little tool that she gets really excited about and shares with me. Now I'm excited too.

Have you visited KartOO?

It's a visual search engine in that once you put in your search topic you get up a picture representation of the most relevant pages.

Here's an image of when I searched my own blog.

Th largest icon on the visual map is a small capture of my homepage, and the large bluish blob that lies in the background has labels on it letting you know the basic site topic/category (ie: blog, guide, photos, deals, tours, etc).

The upper left has a list as well of the major key words found on the pages that are showing. If you roll over a website page icon then you will see a brief description of the site as well.

It's actually a fun way to search and to "see" what might comes up.

Mobile Survey - Online Demo

This is not a commerical...I'm just sharing. I thought I would sit in on the Zoomerang Webinar: Capture "in the moment" feedback with mobile surveys. I've enjoyed using Zoomerang in the past for deploying surveys, and thought it's at least worth a look to see what they are offering in mobile ideas. If nothing else, online webinars are a great way to see what is out there and new to use.

If you are intersted here is the link they have sent me to register for this free seminar:

Reserve your spot today.

Who knew that Costco and Zombies go together?!?

Okay, I'm a little late on this one....

Common Craft posted this one at the end of October that I just had to look at and killed my self laughing. Great way to leave the office on a Friday.

Zombies in Plain English

Online Conference Starts Next Week (Corporate Learning: Trends and Innovations)

I'm quite excited to be participating as a learner at the upcoming Corporate Learning: Trends and Innovations Online conference which begins next Thursday. There is a terrific line up of speakers presenting a wide range of topics over the course of 4 days.

What's great is like a face-to-face conference you can pick and choose which sessions you wish to attend that are of interest to you. Best yet, you can stay home in your pajamas and learn. (hee hee). Seriously, there are 15 or so presenters to learn from. There are over 800 people registered to participate globally. It's all free. Did I say that loud enough FREE!!! How can you not stop in and listen.

I was sent an email today from the organizer George Siemens that linked participants and speakers to a wonderful site that was new for me; Attendr. What a neat representation of attendees, where they are from, who they know and connecting them to who the would like to meet.

Elearning Blueprints Needs Beta Testers

Cathy Moore is looking for some beta testers to try out a new elearing design tool she has been working on.

Elearning Blueprints are online tools that walk you through the process of designing and writing lively elearning content. Beta testers will get access to:

• Design and write clear, engaging elearning materials on any subject
• Immediately apply the ideas to your current project
• Use research-based best practices that will make your elearning more
  powerful
• Find and share creative ideas
• Streamline your elearning development

The premise seems like a great idea and I hope Cathy gets all the feedback necessary to get the project up and running.

eLearning Guild Gives More to Members

The eLearning Guild is upgrading it's membership perks. Associate members can now access 237+ archived issues of Learning Solutions eMagazine and Guild Research 360° Reports will now be available to all Guild Member, Member Plus, and Premium Members.

Thanks to Brent Schlenker's update on this today. You can see much more info from his blog or directly from the eLearning Guild site.

Just in time for my LMS launch.

PC Magazine - Top 100

PC Magazine's latest edition has three great lists to peruse through and try out. They have their picks for:

• Top 100 Undiscovered Sites - "top new or under-the-radar sites of 2007"
• Top 100 Classic Sites - "these sites are best-of-breed in their respective categories"
• Favourite 100 Blogs

Now I just need some time to look through them all.

Flickr Related Tag Browser

Here's one more I found and thought was quite neat. [Link] This site allows you to enter any search term and it will give you a matrix of 36 photos related to that tag. You can click any of the photos to see it enlarged beside the matrix. You can also scroll through the thousands and thousands of other photos with that tag.

The interesting part that gets you to keep exploring here is as you move your mouse away from the photo matrix you are presented with about 40 unique tags related to the original. For example if I start with CAT, I am presented with 1.3 million+ photos. As I move my mouse out other tags that I can now choose from are Baby, Meow, Kitty, Dog, Sleep, Nature, etc. I picked nature and am now sent to 2 Million+ photos to look over with a whole new series of tags to explore.

Truly an interesting way to view photos that have been posted, but also a great demonstration of the power of tags and relationships.

Want to try something really different & uncomfortable?

Okay this may sound like I'm losing my mind, but give it a try first. Stumbling around the internet I found a site called Don't Click It by the Institute for Interactive Research. Basically it is a series of different experiments, games, exercises in trying to use your mouse only as a rollover tool. NO MORE CLICKING the mouse buttons. As this is apparently a waste of our valuable time as computer users. One now simply moves the mouse over the menu we want to expand or circle over a button we want to activate.

The premise sounds quite interesting, but give it a try first. Play around on the site for 5 minutes and you will instantly see how "weird" it feels not to click any thing. Try out several things and see if you get the "warning screen". I did, but only once.

Stumble Upon - Discover New Sites

A colleague I work with sent me an interesting link today. As part of a course she must learn the latest and greatest ways to search the web for content. She found out that 80% of the web is not located through traditional search engines.

Wow....do you know what that means is out there?

Well if it's true, I just googled (I love that's a verb now) the word "the" and got 5,130,000,000 hits. If that is only 20% of what is out there then there are potentially 25,650,000,000 sites that are really in cyberspace. Okay maybe not exactly, but I'm sure the premise is real. Not everyone knows how to set their site up properly to be found by search engines, so it makes sense that many are hiding.

The site my friend referred me to is called Stumble Upon.

When you set up your account you are given the option of choosing which types of sites you would like to see from about 500 different topics. Some examples of categories are alcoholic drinks, internet tools, astronomy, crafts, physics, iraq, online games, open source, and web development.

A toolbar is installed in your browser that when you click it you are sent to a webpage based on one of the topics you have chosen. The pages are ranked by users (3,727,921) and are delivered to you based on the preferences you have chosen.

It's a neat little tool if you are looking around for some different content you've never seen before, if you love to just websurf, and/or you just want to learn what's out there.

Obviously it isn't too new if there are 3.5 million+ users. However, content on the web is always expanding and changing and it's seems like a good way to see what's out there and have your say on ranking a few of the sites.

Not only can you "stumble" through websites but also photos, news articles, videos, and a specific topic. I could lose a lot of time playing with this one.

Some neat ones I stumbled onto (for now....):

Hubble Image Heritage Gallery

Earth Album

Solving a 50-Year-Old Moon Mystery

3000 Hits Today and Still Going

I had my 3000th reader today. That's really cool. I thank you all very much, especially since I have fallen back a little on my posting frequency. The LMS project and other work (not nearly as fun) has taken more of a front seat.

I'm still completely engaged in blogging, reading and learning from one another and try to promote this to my colleagues as often as possible.

I have a follow-up education session at the end of November to see how the T&OD Network (GTA) is liking the online community that I set up for them. Instead of emails flying all over the place we now have one central place (hosted on Yahoo! Groups) to house share files, policies, job postings, speaker reviews, and questions posted to each other. A wonderful feature (true of many web applications) is it's all searchable. I'm hoping that they group votes to continue as currently we have about 75 users on the site. That's about half the group so I need to sell it to the rest of the members.

I'm sharing the same idea with the PPNO next week as well. They too are looking for a central idea to store their posted questions to members and responses. As well as house files, newsletters, calendars, etc. Online communities are great for this purpose.

Thanks again to all my readers and please continue check back frequently, subscribe to the feed, and comment often. I promise to do the same in return and together our knowledge will continue to grow.

Are you coming to "Corporate Learning: Trends and Innovations"?

Well I can only schmooze up to the boss so much without her realizing that I am trying to scheme something out of her and I have been denied to attend the eLearning Guild DevLearn 2007. Disheartening? A little, however I've been able to find lots of great online conferences and learning workshops through the Guild's monthly Online Forums (highly recommend), some through Elluminate and now this great excitement....Corporate Learning: Trends and Innovations.

There are some great speakers participating in this entirely online conference.
7.1 Tony Karrer
7.2 David Snowden
7.3 Jay Cross
7.4 Rebecca Stromeyer
7.5 Richard Straub
7.6 Clark Quinn
7.7 Steve Mahaley
7.8 Gaurav Rastogi and Jai Ganesh
7.9 Keith Resseau
7.10 Donald H. Taylor
7.11 Janet Clarey
7.12 David Wilson
7.13 Rae Tanner
7.14 Bill Bruck
7.15 George Siemens

The conference runs November 15th to the 20th and is free, but REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED.

If you haven't taken a look yet at all the conference has to offer, wander over to the conference wiki that has been set up. Even it is a great example of what you can create with a wiki.

A little off topic - Blog Action Day Stats

As I said a little earlier I've been a little off topic lately and more behind in posting then I would like, but the CBT training is almost over and the LMS/Intranet/CMS meetings are progressing more smoothly.

I was happy though to see a thank you email in my inbox today from the Blog Action Day Team. They posted on thier site some stats from this year's effort.

• 20,603 Blog Participated
• 23,327 Blog Posts (Google Blog Search)
• 14,631,038 RSS Readers

"Impact on the Blogosphere: The graph below shows the frequency of terms appearing in the blogosphere courtesy of BlogTrends. Additionally "Blog Action Day" was the top Technorati search term AND tag for the day."

Blog Action Day - What if we do nothing about global warming???

Today is Blog Action Day. Today 15,000 blogs are focusing in on the environment today. Some are writing, some are donating their earnings. All for the same cause though. We will be hitting potentially 12 million readers today.

So what do I write about. I've been thinking about that for a few days now. I found something I truly want to share and it is this guy's video labelled "The Most Terrifying Thing You'll Ever See". From his description he is a "burnt out high school teacher" with a great message that everyone should wonder about "What will happen to the world should we disregard even the slightest chance that global warming is indeed happening?"

Look up more videos by this gentleman and you find a fun trailer for his sequel "How it all ends". This production is broken into many smaller segments all around global warming and us as a global village taking action NOW and the consequences of not doing so. He presents the argument in a clear and easy manner that even a high school student would understand and more over stay compelled to listen to the entire piece.

I'm sorry that I can't give him credit other than this as I haven't found his true name yet. Thanks to him for opening my eyes a bit more....a lot more.

One more thing you can do today....
Take the time today to see some more blogs focusing in on the environment.

Selling Web 2.0 (again)

I haven't been posting as much as I would truly like. I've been so swamped with work, including trying to prepare our selves to get the LMS up and running. I have however been introducing a few more people to the fabulous use of blogs and wikis.

I have one friend that loves to write poems and has been using the Facebook feature of Notes to capture them. I suggested that if she wanted something a little more private then she could open a blog and use it as a private journal. She also writes collaboratively with another friend. The two of them take turns write a paragraph of a story and see where it goes and ends up. For this I suggested and set up a wiki for them to try out. This way they can go in and read each other's work, make edits and suggestions. They can also create a new page for each story or for each theme of stories and can keep it private or share it as well.

My final sell this weekend was using a blog for a newsletter instead of a paper based item. Currently they create a newsletter in Publisher and then email it out. They only send electronically and do not print it to paper. Sounds like a job for something webish. I took their articles from their last newsletter. Created a new post for each article starting with the last one first. This would allow a reader once they open the blog to read the first intended article as the most recent post of the blog. The last article of the paper copy would appear as the last post as well. The first post they open was titled "In this Issue", with the month and volume/issue number. Then a listing of the post headings as links to each article.

My arguments for them using this system were:

• articles can be tagged for reference and searching (ie: volume 6, issue 3, meeting, agenda)
• articles are all searchable by any word
• articles are all archived individually and monthly
• links on the main web page can be added to the newsletter blog and back to the web page
• because of the flexibility of posting, special articles could be added at times other than regular newsletter issuing dates
• members can subscribe to updates, rss feeds
• the blog can have stats tracked regarding usage.

I'm still waiting for responses on all 3 "new ideas" that I've put out for my colleagues. Now just waiting to see if I sold it all properly.

6 Days and Counting -Blog Action Day 2007

Just a reminder to my blogging friends and readers that Blog Action Day 2007 is fast approaching. Take a few minutes to think about what you can write about, share, and maybe even change the world.

Is your HR tracking software prepared to take on your new LMS?

The on going LMS saga....

TIP 5: If your HR system is not already tracking reporting structure throughout your organization, you may want to start working on that now.
TIP 6: The more information you can use to identify your employees the better to track and report them.

We are still going through the motions of getting our new LMS and our current systems to function together so that 1) we have a comprehensive data base of employees that needs to only be adjusted in one location (HR), and 2) so that managers can track the learning/training progress of employees that report to them.

Currently if we run off a report of our employees we can only break them down into which funding centre pays which group of employees or who looks after their weekly pay. This is not necessarily the manager that they report to; aka. the person responsible for their mandatory learning requirements. This has come up several times in the past and now that we need several new systems, besides the LMS, to talk to the HR system Human Resources is now forced to some how start added new fields to the employee database and use existing fields to better sort reporting structure. This is a daunting task with 2500 employees, but imagine if you are a company with thousands more.

So today's tips are to make sure that your employee database is filled with as much information as possible. It will and can only come in handy later as more and more systems are automated and upgraded.

Speaking of Virtual Frogs

Follow up to my posting about see through frogs....

Here is a link to a site that will give you a free cd-rom digital frog disection. Or if you want to take it further there are several links here for even more animals.

(yes, I too am finding this a little creepy, but better then the smells I remember from my biology classes)

Creating a Navigational Model with Mindomo - LMS Project continues

The LMS we are working on (if you can call it that) is one part of three. The other two parts are the policy and procedure component, and the intranet which will house it all.

I've been working the last couple of days on the lovely task of trying to create our navigational model. The main links that users will use to navigate around the intranet and then some of the lower tiers (or clicks).

We are suppose to produce something that looks like: The blue rectangles would be our tier 1 navigation (the main headings) and the pink rectangles are the tier 2 navigation (sub headings). More tiers can fall under these, but the rule is to try to only have users make 3 clicks to get to any topic. An example: Tier 1 - Directories, Tier 2 - Staff Directory, Tier 3 - Voice Mail.

We have a simplified intranet now composed of Word docs, Publisher pages, pdfs and web links. I wanted to first map what we have to try and decide what tiers we want included in our new intranet. Excel wouldn't let me move items around as easily as I wanted to and PowerPoint has a limited screen size so I thought I would try a web application mind mapping tool. I then started with Mindmeister (a suggestion from Brent Schlenker) - which I do like, but not quite right for this exercise. Then I moved to Bubbl.us (a suggestion from Angela White) - I really like the look and feel of this one, but again just not quite the set up I was looking for this project. Then I came across Mindomo and this is just what I needed.

It's a nice mind mapping tool that allows similar functions as the others, but I seemed to be able to manipulate around the branches of my chart a little easier. I'm able to colour code items, link some together, bound others and expand and expand and expand.

Here's a screen shot of a piece of our current intranet (left zoomed way out, right just a small piece):

The green lines are relations ships, the green/orange squares are items I've highlighted and the red line box are bound items.

My next step is to translate this back to the simple square model above.