Work is learning. Learning is the work. Without AI.
Here is a great metaphor on life;
Each of us is given five balls. One is rubber and four are glass. The rubber ball is work. If you drop it, it will always bounce back. The other four glass balls are family, friends, health and integrity. If you drop them, they are shattered. They won’t bounce back.
From Worthwhile [and thanks to Will for referring this group blog to me].
The Isoph Institute offers a number of white papers, primers and case studies on e-learning for the non-profit sector.
I was recently asked, via the LearnNB community, the following question:
Hi, can you recommend any PhD programs focusing on e-learning research in Canadian universities?
Any recommendations from faculty, students or graduates?
I’m currently managing a few blogs. One is for a community of practice focused on elearning for R&D. It doesn’t get much traffic, and so far I’m the only one to post. Another one is a joint effort, but there aren’t many posts. I noticed that my colleague Hal has not made many posts on this one either, but is writing for his own blog.
My experiences confirm (to me anyway) that blogging is personal. You can’t really just dip into it because you won’t be passionate, and your readers will know it – and leave. You also have to feel that you have ownership of the content. This blog gets the most hits of any of my blogs, even more than some of my previous blogs. I don’t think that group blogging will take off; an exception being Many2Many. Each medium has its strengths and weaknesses, and blogs seem best for personal, passionate individual dialogue (is that an oxymoron?). Personally, I blog to connect with others and for the knowledge management aspects of blogging. It keeps a lot of my thoughts and ideas together.
Defense Acquisition University is looking for an LCMS (learning content management system) – SCORM, LMS, Portal, Legacy Content Conversion, etc.
I’ve been on my own for just over a year, and as I had a couple of days off over the holiday weekend, I thought I’d reflect on what I’ve learned, or confirmed, this past year:
These are the messages that are staying with me.
There’s something happening in Atlantic Canada. It’s still below the surface, but I started to notice it when I got off the corporate train and had more time to read, listen and watch. At the last local cybersocial, I was asked to talk about Open Source, and suddenly many others connected to the event. I have been finding more and more people in the region doing interesting work at an international level. People like Steve Mallett, with his work for O’Reilly, and Hal Richman who has worked on international projects with the UN. This week I was on PEI and met the folks at SilverOrange who are contributing to the Mozilla project, and have five years of solid business success.
I am also helping Rob Paterson teach a course at UPEI on the New Economy. Rob and I discussed the need for new business models that are based on trust and cooperation, such as Dave Pollard’s Natural Enterprise [I helped to coin this term – my very small contribution so far]:
Natural Enterprise (NE): "A form of self-organized, self-managed, community-based business partnership in which two or more people agree to make a living together as collaborators and peers, to strive to attain what each member needs to achieve for his or her personal well-being, to accept substantial responsibility for each other, and to respect and help the community or communities in which the enterprise operates."
Natural Enterpises exist already, and the more I look around the region, the more I see. Maybe this is because we are on the edge, away from the bustling core. Canada is on the edge of the USA, and Atlantic Canada is on the edge of Canada. In networks, much of the value comes from the edges. Perhaps our perspectives from outside the mainstream enable us to see the larger patterns.
I’m optimistic that our region is going to be a hotbed of collaboration between NE’s. There are a lot of creative, intelligent and innovative small companies collaborating on some big projects. What I have noticed is that most of these people are already giving back to their communities, and they want to make this a better place to live and work. They also understand the hard lessons of business and know how to deliver projects on-time and on-budget. Every time I meet another NE, I feel better for our collective future.
OK, I’m trying to use more open source technologies and am using Firefox 0.9.1 and I like it. Unfortunately, there is a function that does not work with the Drupal text editor. Firefox won’t let me paste text from the clipboard into the body of a post. That means that I can’t quote text from other blogs – an essential part of blogging. The help file from Mozilla that automatically pops up makes no sense at all to me. I’ve looked into the forums but to no avail. Is there an easy way to do this, or should I just use IE, which lets me copy & paste with no difficulty. If I can surmount this obstacle, I will gladly dump IE and its security issues. Help.
Anyone interested in a Flash Meeting here in the Maritimes?
Here is some solid, unbiased, advice from CMS Watch on using open source CMS; which is also applicable for using open source learning content management systems.
In my opinion, one major issue with every OSS CMS package is that most require a major developer learning curve to fulfill even small content requirements. So you can count on configuration and customization, regardless of your environment.
… However, OSS CMS software has really evolved lately, some even becoming, in my opinion, "enterprise capable." Having access to all the source code can allow you to build to almost any content requirements that you may have. OSS also allows you to "try before you commit." You can run a prototype whenever and for however long you want. So, you can certainly pay out on your investment.
There you have it from Tony.