I knew this from my own experiences but now I can point to a study that substantiates this point.  Another fine example of evidence-based education.

Has everything you need to run a business online.  Just amazing!

Harold Jarche, Tony Karrer, and Michele Martin will be hosting a FREE six-week learning event on “social media for learning professionals.”  It sounds like a online “unworkshop” and should be a great event.  They are asking people to pass the announcement on (especially to people who are not online).

A free service that takes your PDF files and turns them into a great looking online magazine where you can virtually flip pages and embed your magazine on your blog.  Very cool tool that is perfect for journalism classes or for producing great training materials.

I am on a break but I had to pass this along.  I met with a good friend over lunch at a break in his two-day training course.  He told this was actually a two-week course but the organization putting it on decided to condense it to two days - without leaving out any content.  The training consists of PowerPoint after PowerPoint presentations (enough bulletpoints to massacre a small city) given by subject matter experts who are “winging it.”  One fellow put up a seven-page PDF which he read from.  Another projected legal documents which he had to squint at to read (and he was standing next to the screen.  Imagine what it looked like to the folks in the back).

They were supposed to receive handouts but, because the organizers didn’t know how many people were coming, it was decided to deliver these to the participants after the training.  Questions are being discouraged because there is a lot of content to cover and not enough time to dwell on things.

As one trainer said to them:  “Here it is. Choke it down.”

Will be at the Kentucky Communication Association conference to talk about public speaking apprehension.  See you on the 15th.

I found this while putting together a presentation on using wikis in teaching.  Great summary of the various uses of wikis.

I first checked out Alltop.com back during the summer and I was instantly hooked on the politics section.  Then, they added a speaking section.  Now, the number of categories has grown.  The brillance of Alltop is that is a collection of blogs in a subject arranged in columns for easy scanning of headlines. Hover over a posting and a preview ballon gives you the first paragraph.  Better than the morning paper and without all of that folding.

The Big Question of September from Tony Karrer is about “To Learn Lists” (TLL) which are tools that knowledge workers use for refining their knowledge, skills, and abilities.  I actually learned about TLLs from my grandfather who was a great admirer of Benjamin Franklin.  Like Benjamin Franklin, he was a self-educated man who, despite only finishing grammar school, built a successful business, raised eight children, and died a multimillionaire.  He attributed his success to a curiousity about the world and his study of a wide variety of topics.

It was from him that I picked up the habit of listing five new topics I wanted to learn more about.  On the first day of summer, I made this list and went down to the library and picked out books on these topics.  I then spent all summer, fall, and winter studying these subjects.  I make a conscious effort to pick topics that are very different from each other and from what I encounter at work.

This has been a great source of insight and innovation to me because lessons I learn in other fields have been the spark for insights into my work.  For example, one summer topic was to learn more about opera.  I read about the famous operas, how rehearsals worked, and how people trained for their roles.  It was when I read about how the stagehands planned and executed moving huge set pieces and coordinated the action on stage that I picked up some great ideas on project management.  I have often found that one field may have a solution to a problem in another field but you would never find it because of the tendency to specialize among knowledge workers.

It would be great if organizations would encourage TLLs among their employees but the concern for ROI and alignment would preclude letting employees study what they want in the uncertain hope that they would find something that could help the organization.

Harold Jarche has two intriguing postings about his revisioning of training and performance for organizations in the 21st Century.  Great stuff especially about letting workers control their own learning while the organization handles the performance issues.  I would add two items though:

1)  While the employees are fully in control of their learning they should also be made aware of the strategic focus of the organization and what knowledge, skills, and abilities would help meet those organizational goals.

2)  And in return, the organization should enculture an environment of trust so that employees feel free to learn and sometimes fail in their journey to improvement.  The organization should also have follow-through management to ensure that the lessons learned are being reinforced.

I am eager to see how Jarche evolves his model.

When the Wii first came out, there were many ideas for integrating Wii into education.  Such as a $99 Smartboard or a virtual dance space.  There was even talk of integrating Wii and Second Life.

So, a year later and what’s happened with Wii in education?  There is a UK hospital that using Wii for training its surgeons.

As I work with new educational technology tools, I often download open source applications that require the Linux, Apache, MySql, and PHP (or similar platform) to run these applications. I have used all-in-one installers like XAMPP but there is always some bug or issue when I install a new application or try to upgrade a component.

So, surfing around last night, I found BitNami which packages the most popular open source applications such as Moodle, Drupal, Mediawiki, etc. In one hour, I downloaded the LAMP architecture, Moodle, Drupal, Joomla, Mediawiki, WordPress, and phpBoard. Now these are just development versions and not production ready but every application installed without a hitch and ran smoothly. This is great for learning how to work with these programs and for playing around with their settings and their themes.

Two-part article from THE Journal about using research to guide educational technology decisions.  The goal of this series is to help educators cut through vendor-supplied research and other similar reports to determine the actual capabilities of a technology solution.  Having been in these types of decisions, these articles should be required reading.