A New Look at Old Goals

Below are the goal(s) that I set for myself at the beginning of the semester. My main goal, as seen below, was to discover faster ways to deliver course content online. In my mind, I think I covered this pretty well. I'll be blunt when I say that my goals change in my brain more often than they do on paper. However, in this case, I came back to my original goal...full circle if you will. I have proposed to have some of our overview training for my customer (not central training) put online. My boss and I agree that this is a good idea. However, it will not be until we actually get into the "meaty" courses that we will be able to experiment with this wiki thing. Whether it works here or not is the next question. Working here is a little different. We have a whole different subspecies of conehead.

I believe focusing solely on the wiki provided an opportunity for me to go more in depth with that program. The wiki, or other web building program, will provide the foundation for the overall course site. Other Web 2.0 applications can feed off of the wiki in my proposal. It would be harder to build a course based solely on a blog or photo sharing site.

I'll leave it up to the rest of you to decide.

Hello Dr. Brady,

I understand that you would like to see our goals from the course. Mine are simple. I want to see the methods out there for delivering content over the web. Mainly, I want to know how to do it faster. I have a fairly strong history with internet use and web-site development, but that's where it ends. Right now, my job uses pretty archaic methods of course deliver (face-to-face). This works very well with many people, but with the professionally diverse audiences, scheduling is taking up seemingly as much time as the course development itself.

Here's a direct link to the paper attachment for download. Also, for fun, here's the narrated video/slideshow of the presentation.

If you would like the paper in a different location, let me know. I think you've already read most of what I have so far. The link to the wiki should work. If there are any problems, I'll do what I can tonight to fix them.

Slideshow

Ok, sorry all. I forgot to make that slideshow public. I'll do that tonight!

Update

The wiki is updated. The paper is attached, for the time being, at the bottom of the home page. Find it here.

Be gentle...it's not finished

Well, I know we're supposed to have a rough sketch of our project by tomorrow. Though I haven't seen anything about where to turn it in, it was a good bench mark. I have proceeded with my original plan for the project. There will be a video PowerPoint added to the home page of my Wiki course. Let me know what you think.

Ben's 593 Project

Wiki's

I'd never known what Wiki actually meant. Hawaiian for quick...interesting. I guess quickie was already taken (man that was bad.) Actually with Wiki's, I have found that wetpaint is probably the most user-friendly that I have found. It can't do a whole lot, but it has done everything I've needed it for.

I think that wikis are going to come up in the world of business. A peer-edited, company-relevant encyclopedia of whatever would definitely come in handy for training. This would be especially useful if one could integrate this kind of technology at a company's inception. It would make training for the staff of that company tremendously easier to develop. It would also provide a pretty solid training aid.

Keep in mind, there are weaknesses to a wiki. If all your peers are idiots overconfident in their knowledge of a certain topic, it can really make that peer-edited feature a pitfall. However, despite this, I think we'll see them popping up more and more.

RSS and Aggregators

Here are a couple of interesting and basic links that list and/or rate aggregators.

wikipedia list
about.com ratings

This is interesting from this week's entry: "Some organizations are using this to let people know about changes to documents or procedures, etc."

This would be a great boon to training and to the workers here at LANL if we could use something like this to guarantee that everyone gets copied on procedural updates. Right now, we're working with a great doc control coordinator, but he's still human. If the employee could register/sign up for a feed, the responsibility would fall on the worker to ensure that they check the feed. I believe it would create less work for all parties involved. More to come...

Forgive the random links. I'm about to explore these further, and wanted to post them on the blog early.

I have found out that Blogger does not support podcasting, but it is relatively easy to link your podcast that is hosted on another server to your blog on Blogger. Check out this video to find out a little more about it. Somebody made a relatively easy tutorial about this topic.

Youtube Tutorial

feedburner
libsyn $5

As far as podcasting goes in the professional world, this is something we can use. The idea of linking audio to portable devices is a great idea. Even here at the lab, where portable devices are frowned upon at best, audio could take the place of much of the reading we have to do. There is a crazy idea that I had, that probably would flop, but I thought of having audio procedures here. As with any large installation, procedures are key. If we could have audio procedures, much of the required reading could be taken care of while you go about your other work, particularly for non-critical procedures. Also, if you're having trouble sleeping at night...

Drop.io--photo, media, and everything sharing...

Here's one for ya. This site I came across is called drop.io. It is designed to keep media sharing private and limit access levels to those whom the client deems necessary. It even has a feature to charge visitors to see the content. I ran across their sample sites and it seems to be pretty friendly. After poking around for a while, this is more of what I think would be useful for a company to share media, etc. It is not limited to pictures/photos, has many ways to transmit data, and provides a cost-recovery option.

Now really, this isn't a photo/media sharing site, but it can be utilized in that fashion. I'm very impressed by flexible applications. I'm a one-stop shopper, and this one fills the bill for quite a bit of stuff.

Here's the demo, which is what this short "eval" is based on. drop.io demo

This application has many uses in project management, information distribution, etc. The interesting this is that these "drops" cannot be searched. Therefore, it is difficult for Joe Sixpack to access your information. Really, only those who have email invitations can find you.

Proposal-ish

Here is an email between me and Dr. Brady. My original is at the bottom. What I'd like is a little feedback from the rest of the class, if you all have time. Also, I plan on putting a link to my rough sketch up here (or somewhere) pretty soon.

Hi Ben --
I think this is a good start to your proposal. You've got a problem, a model, and a basic approach. So, you will have to make design choices and justify them. Since this is the Web 2.0 course, what I'd be most interested in is your choice of Web 2.0 applications, why you chose them, and how you see them being used. What advantage would they give you over what you have now.
I specify that the project is a "design" and if any of it is implemented, that's a bonus. So, if you came up with that number of slides that spelled out the basics of your design, I would think that would be fine. Think of it this way -- what would you have to do to sell the idea to your boss or bosses?
I'm going to have more about this on the course blog by tomorrow evening. Good start.
Kevin


| From: Ben
| Subject: Proposal-ish
Date Sent: March 10, 2009 8:10 AM
To: Dr. Brady

Hey Dr. Brady,

So here's what I was thinking. It sounds strange, but I was looking at the bodybuilding.com website, and really liked the layout of the site. I think that it could be applied to instructional design for a course. You ought to check it out, even though it is a bit commercialized. There is some good stuff in there.

Since this can be a 10-15 slide presentation (or more like 20) with support documentation, I was looking at seeing how a commercial social networking site, combined with a KMS, etc. could be applied to the world of ID. I'd like to explore how I could link sites together in a similar fashion to support training development at a large organization like the lab.

There would be a peer edited/company controlled KMS, much like the workout database and exercise database, links to recent articles about training, and online modules for ID instruction.

The reason I came up with this idea is because, at LANL, trainers often do not communicate with the larger body much. We are isolated teams of training specialists (and students) who try to do everything the same way after taking a few classes together and getting released to do the work.

I like this idea, but I don't know if I'm biting off more than I can chew. Actual execution of a program like this would take months or a few years in a place like this, but I may come up with the ADDIE design for the Training Specialist Qualification Program online for an organization much faster. TSQP is just what we call it here at LANL.

What do you think? Also, if this email seems disjointed or incoherent, there may be 2 reasons. The time change is kicking my butt, and I'm still not concrete on this idea, though I'm close.

Photo and Media Sharing

We're entering a realm that I'm not entirely familiar with, here. I haven't really done a lot of photo sharing, other than on Facebook. I see limitations on the applications for training, especially where I work. However, there are some opportunities in high school and mid school education.

I played around with Flickr for a minute and it seems to be another social networking site with more emphasis on photos.

I checked out photobucket as well. Honestly, I wasn't too impressed with the photo sharing sites. The usability is decent, but I'm struggling with what they can be used for. I understand the social aspects of it, but it seems to be another way to simply connect peer-to-peer. However, many social networking sites have many of the same features, but more opportunities for communication. Correct me if I'm wrong. I just think that these are great for private use or educational use (i.e. sharing photos for research or sharing artwork.)

In the world of training, I think these sites may fall short. Often, business materials are too sensitive to share with a site that is prone to copyright infringement.

Wrap-Up Week 7/8, Begin Week 9

Upon exploring Social Networking, I feel that there is a place for developing in-house, private social networks, particularly where there are security or privacy issues, such as in government and private industry. It is difficult to guarantee privacy on the web anywhere, and certain information would not be shared even on an in-house social network, but I think Facebook, Myspace, and others are a little too public for my applications. However, I believe that in-house social networks could come into use in coming years. They would help organize a company virtually.

I don't personally know if they have a great deal of use in honest-to-goodness training applications, but they can help in the post-training arena. As a tool to connect specialists to one another across a big complex, social networks could be used to great effect.

I'll be exploring some of these ideas in my end of the semester project.

Of All Things...

I was looking around today, and as a semi-avid weightlifter, I look around for workout and exercise ideas. I found a social network for bodybuilders/weightlifters/fitness models and every average joe out there trying to change their body. It's called Bodyspace, it's on bodybuilding.com, and it's free. I think this is an example of people incorporating the social networking idea into existing sites, as I don't remember this aspect 3 years ago.

It seems that if social networking can be used for bodybuilding, it could be used for training. It would especially help with building peer relationships if the social network is left small enough.

In fact, this social network is literally connected to "training," albeit not the kind we're talking about in OLIT. It does provide structure and support to achieve a goal.

Social Networking Part Deux

Well, after my last post, I ran across an interesting article on zdnet. It is located here . I recall being in elementary school when video games really started to get popular. The Nintendo came out and we all had to play. Those were the good old days. Of course, I remember my parents complaining that those video games would rot my brain. According to some, I turned out ok in spite of, or perhaps regardless of video games.

Are social networks the bane of the English language? Probably not. Will they rot all our minds? Probably not. I think I'll blame txting insted. Wut do u thinkg?

Social Networking and Education

I'm looking at my social networking accounts and I see mild potential for academic application. I believe it would be easier to apply the social networking concept to adult training than high school or even college education. The younger people, around 13-18 years old, tend to get a little...off track. Using social networking for these applications would be complicated. Again, I would advocate internal social networking sites that limit access to irrelevant information.

Just a thought.

Old and Interesting

This 2005 Business Week article on the explosion of blogging is interesting. It looks at the rate blogging was growing at the time and cautioned business not to ignore blogs. There are some specific examples of businesses using blogs, perhaps the most interesting being the GM example. I'm not sure how much that will help them now, but look for the stuff about GM. The link to their actual blog is here.

Bookmark this on Delicious

Linking Social Bookmarking to Blogs

Today, I've added my social bookmarking website to this blog. This will link the small well of knowledge I have gained about ID and Web 2.0 (very small well) to the blog for this class. If you're having trouble linking your social bookmarks to this site, you can use the layout and add a gadget, or you can follow the steps in my del.icio.us link list.

Social Bookmarking

Call me crazy, but it seems that Social Bookmarking would have more uses for academia than blogging. I see hundreds of ideas for education and training. A class-accessible collection of resources about a given topic.

Right now, I work for emergency management. There is no single place, that I know of, where all the FEMA, OSHA, Federal, etc. documents are listed or accessible. It would be great to have a site that focuses on Emergency Management that had all the new and old relevant resources.

For education, the ideas are infinite. A social bookmarking site focused on interpretations of the balcony scene in R&J. This list would fill my blog a little much, so I think I'll leave it up to your imaginations to fill in the rest.

Anyway, I joined del.icio.us for social bookmarking. The username is chewie146, so feel free to take a look at my empty page. I haven't bookmarked anything yet, but I may today.

Web 2.0 and Blogging

I used blogspot because it's owned by Google, convenient, and I already have a gmail account. It seems easy enough to use, and I believe I can do most of what I want to.

More on the blog.
Personally, I'm a pretty big shooter, hunter, etc. I may use blogging to discuss/share my opinions and ideas about those things. There is a new bill in the House Committee that might find some space on my blog.

Professionally, it's an avenue to inform fellow workers about new developments in company and national policy that affect individual people, comment on recent happenings, or perhaps share information about projects, etc.