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.

If you don't want to do it virtually...how about see through

I've always wondered with technology the way it is, why are students still dissecting animals for biology classes. Why not use a computer program that's been around for 15+ years and just do it virtually? No more sad little screams of "YOU WANT ME TO DO WHAT TO THE FROG?!?!"

Well Japanese scientists have come up with another way that maybe teachers will latch onto instead. How about a see through frog? No need to cut Kermit open when you can now instead watch all his organs, veins, and eggs (Kermit's sister) develop over the span of its life.
Photograph by Ho New/Reuters

Microsoft Surface Makes Guest Appearance on CSI Miami

Well to my delight the new season of fall shows has begun. Thank goodness for satellite so that I can watch one show, pvr another and then catch another one during a different timezone showing.

Last night I was catching up on all the new episodes of CSIs; Miami, New York, Las Vegas, NCSI. During CSI Miami I was quite excited to see that they were now using right in the middle of their lab a Microsoft Surface. A parole officer had been killed by one of his parolees. So how better to find a list of call his charges but to look through his Blackberry. How better to get the data off the Blackberry then to place it down onto a Microsoft Surface. If you've looked at the Microsoft promo spots on their site then you would recognize the telltale ripple marks that immediately appeared when the mobile was set down instantly linking the two (pic). Then, like some magical ballet, the character Calleigh begins to wave her hands over the Surface and sorts all the bad guys instantly into lists of bad to evil, and one MO from another.

Now I wonder if it was a one shot product placement or if the Surface will have a recurring role.

Developing an e-Learning Strategy and Architecture - Lance Dublin (Elluminate Webinar)

Developing an e-Learning Strategy and Architecture - Lance Dublin

This was my first Elluminate webinar and it was quite neat to see a different format then I have seen before. One tool I haven't used before was a whiteboard that participants can add too and slides can be altered as the presenter speaks. All participants can use a mic if wanted.

Webinar points:

Yesterday's communication - same time , same place (ie: meetings, phone calls)
Today's Communication - any time, any place (ie: chants, blogs, wikis, virtual offices)

Strategy - the way we get there:

eLearning Pathway might have been as.....(9 elements)
discover, envision, understand, analyze, define, enlist, plan, implement, learn

Doesn't really happen this way. Much more like putting several pieces of an elearning architecture together. It is more like including the above 9 elements, but not in a particular order.

Discover - what is the purpose of your organization, type of environment, how your place works
Envision - create a vision, something to draw and motivate people
Understand - identify gaps you may have in getting to where you want to go with your learning
Analyze - learn about all the types of learning options that you may have
Define -
Enlist - emplementing, business case (next webinar)
Plan and Implement - (next webinar)

Architecture - the place you want to get

Ad Hoc Model:
do you have info - documents, websites, etc.
do you have training - paper based, instructor lead, videos, etc
do you have elearning - we had a course and now we deliver over the internet

Foundations for Learning (Bloom) (Rube Goldberg):
Need for Knowledge - job aids, remembering info
Comprehension - job aid and on the job training
Application - self-paced training, and OJT
Analysis - instructor led and OJT
Synthesis - developing training for others

Now we need to find/develop the right learning product for the right learner and the right situation.

Ensuring Performance:
we could give a person more support, tools, information, learning

Fastest way to improve their performance
Most participants chose the answer as TOOLS.
The slowest way to get there is Learning.
A great way is support - bringing the info when they need it.

Process Perspective:
Performance can be helped/enhanced by taking data/info through requirements, using tools like job aids, webinars, etc, creating some applications, that the user can then take to better their performance.

Content Perspective:
Sometimes organizations want to push content/courses. (formal)
Sometimes staff need to find info and pull it from searches, OJT, mentors, chats, collaboration.
Sometimes it needs to be embedded into the work, performance support systems, expert systems, workflow learning

Time/Place Perspective:
Physical ----
same time same place - classes, ojt
same time, any place - webinars
Virtual----
any time, same place - job aids
any time, any place - elearning

Question is...how do you blend them successfully all together? This is the world we are moving into.

Examples:

Strategy--Technology
Learning from collocation--face-to-face (learning labs, mentoring, role playing)
Learn from collaboration--collaborative (e-labs, virtual classrooms)
learn from interaction--multimedia
learn from information--internet

Moving from Aware, to conceptual, to functional, to competent, to expert using...
basic information, structured information, applied learning, action learning

LMS Project....A Little More Progress

Well, where to start. Nothing has been happening since our last meeting in August, or so we thought. The LMS vendor has been working on there part but not quite according to the time lines we had initially set out upon. After a brief meeting today we set up weekly phone conferences between our LMS provider and the 3 project leaders (and some of their support members) here at work.

TIP 1-3 See (LMS - I don't want to be Little Miss Should've and Tony Karrer's LMS Gotchas)
TIP 4 - make sure you set up these meetings right from the beginning. Don't assume they are going to happen. This is the first way to ensure the LMS vendor is doing what they promised and that your team is doing what is expected of them to move the project forward.

We are now going to attempt to move a little more quickly then initially planned out. What does this mean? We are having several meetings (by phone) over the next few days to hammer out details of server preparation, staff database transfers and some remote training. We are going 0 to 60 without trying to go too fast. We are also aborting the idea of setting up the intranet first, then the CMS and then the LMS. We have decided to push at least the intranet and LMS forward at the same time. Amazingly enough though they (the vendor) is still convinced they can stick to the November go live date even with the several weeks of silence we've just gone through.

Meeting Werner Berger

Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Werner Berger as we were talking with him to come and speak to our organization.

"Werner is the oldest North American to have stood atop the summit of Everest, and we believe him to be the fourth oldest person in the world to have accomplished that feat. Werner is the oldest North American to have completed the 'Seven Summits'."

Some of the key ideas and thoughts that came from him out of that meeting I wanted to capture and decided I would place them here.

• The Mountain doesn't care what I do, it is I that must rise above and not be a victim of circumstance
• Visions/Mission - you need a desired outcome, that is time sensitive and tangible, then decided what steps you will need to get there and just do those
• Vision yourself there and then visusualize how you got to that point
• Be clear on what you want
• Open and honest communication always needed
• Need the ablitity to challenge that which is causing trouble, permission to speak up without being penalized
• reframing your mindset not to see the problem, but the solution and the steps that you took to get to the solution

Showing The Value in Web 2.0 Tools to Create Buy-in

I listened in on Clark Quinn's presentation for the eLearning Guild yesterday and two comments hit me hard:

"You're not about training/learning, you're about empowering performance."
"You're not about computers or web, you're about all technology."

I draw from these thoughts that I can't just be the only one using these web applications. I need my colleagues to start playing with them and learning how to use the tools. I need to be more of an advocate for how the tools could assist their productivity and promote more often.

I have already successfully had the management team to try out a wiki as a tool for capturing answers to questions instead of sending out a survey and having to compile the data manually. I also have the team fully immersed in using online survey tools such as Zoomerang and Survey Monkey.

Today I decided to share the idea of mind mapping or brain storming online using the same type of principals as a wiki. Users can each go into the map and add their thoughts at their convenience. I suggested that when an occasion occurred for such a tool to let me know and I would help get one established for the team to use. The comment was put to me by my co-worker, "I really need to see the value of it to know if I'd want to use it."

Then, amazingly ten minutes later an occasion has come up to try it out. We teach a course several times a year where three of us each teach a different topic for a full day. We have decided that because there are key messages we are trying to spread through out the organization, we should make sure that we are each touching on these messages during our training sessions. Since finding meeting time together right now would prove very difficult we are going to use a mind mapping web tool to plan out what messages/themes we currently each deliver and then how we can tie them together to match the organizational plan.

My co-worker immediately said, "That's a great idea....I see value in that." Now after she uses the tool once she will be able to see how it could be applied to other situations. I just had to discover the perfect stepping off point in which to start and grab hold of her attention and willingness to discover something new.

E-Learning by Design, Not by Default (eLearning Guild Online Forum)

E-Learning by Design, Not by Default: An Overview for Setting your e-Learning Strategy - Clark Quinn, Ph.D. Quinnovation (blog)

Today the eLearning Guild began hosting another set of online forums. The opening session was by Clark Quinn of Quinnovation. I enjoy making notes in this "live blogging" manner so that I can refer back to them and I can share them a bit as a review of the presentations.

Clark's presentation was a great start to September's series of online forums. It was an extremely informative session for all levels of users of elearning design and development. He was wonderful at making sure all attendees' questions were addressed. I look forward to catching any presentations he may give in the future.

"We can no longer just learn everything we need at the beginning and hope that it will carry us through the rest of our career lives."

Problems group was facing with elearning:
multilinquistists
distance
resources
time
money
changing regulations
more simulations
competing with small organizations
internationalization
workers coming in with less skills then desired
retiring expertise
motivating learners
growing number of students
access for all learners

Is eLearning a solution or a distraction?
easy to try, but never the be all and end all of every thing

What do participants think eLearning is?
self paced, online
blogs, wikis, rss, courses, websites,
integration of technology into the learning/training process
web based
delivered over the internet/intranet

split between any learning over an electronic means and specifically training/course based

Elearning Myths
is a panacea
will go away soon
is about the technology
is about content
will replace training
is difficult and/or expensive (not with web 2.0 applications)
cheaper (no, used to sell it, but not cheaper - goal is to execute better for the same money)
only for the new generation (no)
if you build it, they will come
if you build it, they will learn (must lead to meaningful change and learning that works, is applied)

"It's not about learning it's about doing. Doing things better and more effectively."

Empowering the organization through information systems.

Trying to achieve:
Integration. Innovation. Execution. Efficiency. Effectiveness. Performance Support. Community.

Strategy:
Step 0:
Tech - hosted or web based conferences
Benefits - broad reach, low downtime, single investment into system
Costs - you tend to get low quality, increased maintenance

Step 1: Improved Instructional Design
Tech - LMS - for tracking, are we getting the ROI we expect (LMS tend to have all the money put into system and non left for content)
Benefits - getting learning that will motivate and involve learners
Costs - improve capabilities, gets over used, is very novice based

Step 2: Performance focus
Tech - portals of resources (policies, procedures, other info)
Benefits - better performance, supports more then novices
Costs - redundant development, hard to search/use (many different ways to search for info by all users)

Step 3: eCommunity
Tech - blogs, wikis, discussion boards, yellow pages
Benefits- supports top performers, captures hidden knowledge (experts can talk, share new knowledge, brainstorm, one level of education supports another)
Costs - needs support, hard to catalyze

Step 4: Greater integration
Tech - CMS (material from others), xml/dita (semantics and tags added to info)
Benefits - decrease overlap, efficiency, silos eliminated between user groups
Costs - organization tends to become coordinated

Step 5: Broader Distribution can be supported by step 4 - making learning mobile
Tech - devices (mobile, cell phones, pdas, etc), media tools
Benefits - trading bandwidth for convenience, listen while driving, learn while waiting, don't need large amounts of paper to take learning with you, Context sensitive - ie: fedex scanning a pkg before handing over,
Cost - redundancy can occur (low bandwidth, higher bandwidth), conversion costs for media

"if you're not measuring it, why use it" don't assume it's perfect from the beginning

Step 6: Performance Ecosystems - Suites of resources so that everyone can work to their best, single place to go for what you need
Tech - competency, content (description), roles (who you are and what you can have access to, or tasks you might handle)
Benefits - unified approach to everyone's efforts
Costs - linking systems throughout and organization as well as the organization

Words people were wondering definitions for:
web 2.0
SMS
ERP
LMS - learning management systems
CMS - content management systems
ILT - Instructor Based Training
WBT - Web based training
CBT - Classroom based training

Participants were 53% at level 0 and 30% level 1, a couple at level 2, 3 and 5

Essential eLearning Elements
-organizational implementation
-some project management to focus, keep scope, find resources, keep schedule
-enlightened Instructional Design
-performance focus (think of supporting full performance not just course content)
-flexibility (adapt to users, new technology)
-technology savvy (know what it is good for, get what you need but don't go overboard)
-good partners/advice (find people who can support your efforts)

Learning
1) present....apply...practice...reflect...present...appy...practice...reflect
2) reference framework...examples...space practice...job aids...communicaiton...reference framework...examples...space practice...job aid....communication

-spacing practice out will promote retention and understanding of material
-reference examples can become job aids that learners can take to the real application
-included self reflection tests for learners to decided if they are ready to move on

"You're not about training/learning, you're abut empowering performance."
"You're not about computers or web, you're about all technology."

Next steps:
-identify your needs as an ID and organization
-assess your readiness
-recruit needed capability
-scan for opportunities
-choose your priorities
-plan your implementation
-execute