Tools for Getting Started in Second Life

Elena at Lively Learning posted some comments about Second Life for education in response to my liveblogging of the TCC Keynote Why do we need a Second Life? (Her original post is in Russian; the Google translation gave me enough to get the gist of her post.)

In response to my comment on her post, she asked this question:

In your comment you’ve mentioned about last year’s introduction to second life - is possible to find it somewhere? Second Life is not popular in Russia now but it is obvious that interesting is raising. I would appreciate if you can give some information about it!

Unfortunately, the archive from TCC 2007 isn’t public and requires paid registration. However, there seem to be lots of free online tools available.

I’ve bookmarked a few Second Life resources previously.

• For just getting started using Second Life, these video tutorials are really helpful.
• I haven’t spent much time with it, but the New Media Consortium’s Getting Started page is probably where I’ll go first when I decide to start playing with SL again.
• For educational purposes, I’m sure the folks at the SLED (Second Life Education) community would have lots of ideas. The SLED blog looks good too.
• This wiki with educational uses of Second Life has a number of resources.
• Karl Kapp’s MSIT Second Life wiki has lots of resources. You could also search his blog archives, as he writes about Second Life often.

I know I have readers with a lot more experience in Second Life than me. What resources have been helpful to you? What would you recommend for Elena? Is there anything on Second Life in Russian?

Technorati Tags: second+life, russia, education, tcc2008,

TCC08 Keynote: Why Do We Need A Second Life?

Presenter: Dr. Barbara P. McLain, Professor, Music Education and Secondary Instrumental, University of Hawai’i at Manoa

In Second Life: Professor Lilliehook

“Change ahead requires vision now”

Visions for change

• Touch screen computers
• Holographic displays
• 3D TV
• Merged technologies

What would you do as an educator if you had a holographic display?

Trends

• Social networking
• Visual communication
• Diminishing attention spans
• Multitasking
• Game-based learning
• Improved bandwidth & access
• High def screens
• Touch screen interfaces
• Merged technologies
• Open source software
• Internet subscription software

Overview of Second Life

• Wants to explain why people are so excited about it
• She thinks its a little ahead of its time–we’re catching up, but it’s slow
• Free software, but land costs
• Grid: how land is laid out
• Archipelagos for land
• In-world economy of Linden Dollars
• Avatar Creation
• Tools available

Says better help from other people than the in-game help

Everyone has art ability–everyone can build

Library of Congress has a Second Life

• New Media Consortium Getting Started info: http://sl.nmc.org/wiki/Getting_Started
• NMC’s own orientation island: http://sl.nmc.org/join/

Educational growth in SL–nearly anything can be taught in SL. Growth is like previous growth of online education

Second Life & virtual worlds are a new movement, but SL isn’t the first world and won’t be the last

Minimum Needs for Teaching

• Space (Borrow, buy, or rent)
• Skills
• Time–she calls it “wonderful time” but there is a learning curve

Why Second Life Education

• No subject left behind!
• Many classroom limitations gone–size, space
• Engaging–banish lectures
• Address more learning styles
• Research opportunities

Research from Intellagirl:

• 91% of students see the internet as a place for answers
• There are more online gamers than golfers in the world

Schools are not the only places to go for learning

How Second Life Education

• Active, student-centered learning. If you’re just going to do a lecture, don’t do it in SL–there are better avenues for that.
• Peer groups

Selling Second Life Education to Administrators

• Match to institutional goals
• Collaborate with prior successful projects
• Look for unique opportunities

4 Types of School Administrators

• Sherman Tank: always has to be in control, has to be their idea. Give them the credit so you can get your stuff.
• Social Butterfly: include pictures in your proposal
• Teddy Bear: 75% of administrators–they are worried about porn, access for all–they are the nesters of the world, want to protect us.
• Picky Picky: their avatars will look exactly like they do in real life. They will check all the details

In the chat: “But almost every major technology has been propelled forward by pornography! See, all we’re doing is leveraging the most recent porn delivery platform for instructional purposes. We did it with the web, we can do it with SL. ^_^”

Responding to Naysayers

• It’s more than just a game
• There’s porn online and in the convenience store down the street too, not just in SL. It’s a matter of choice.
• It’s cheaper than Blackboard.
• “It’s too complicated”: So is web design, but we have online courses
• “The avatars are too sexy”: So are some of the profs (at least in Hawaii where she teaches)

Q: Community college environment is more concrete and don’t see this as part of their academic environment
A: She provided a zip file with a sample proposal, research, etc. Just like when online learning started, you share the quality examples. Sometimes you have to wait for those administrators to retire though.

Read the other liveblogged posts from this conference.

Image: ‘The Teach‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/18839217@N02/2381606521

Technorati Tags: tcc08, tcc2008, secondlife, education

My Goal: Better E-Learning Interactivity

The Learning Circuits Big Question for April is

What would you like to do better as a Learning Professional?

My overarching professional development goal right now is to improve the interactivity in the courses I develop. Because we’re a small company and a small team, any interactivity needs to be something I can do myself—there’s no Flash developer to pass it off to. I’ve done a few things in the courses I’ve done so far, but I know this is an area where I have huge room for improvement.

How am I planning to reach this goal?

• More Captivate: I’ve done some small-scale branching exercises and some short scenarios and cases. I know I can integrate more of those with these graduate courses.
• Learning Flash: I’ve been veeery slowly trying to learn Flash for months. I put it aside for a while, but I’m trying to pick it up again now. I see Flash as something I’d probably integrate with Captivate activities when I can’t quite do what I want in Captivate. I don’t expect to be a great Action Script programmer, but knowing some of that animation would help give me more options in Captivate.
• Reading: All the blog reading I do is certainly part of my personal learning, and I do look for information on effective interactivity. I’ve been doing my research and saving my links. Dead tree format is still helpful too; I really enjoy Michael Allen’s books. I’m reading William Horton now and expecting to get more ideas.
• Games & Simulations: I haven’t done any games for this job, but I think there’s some possibilities. We have a course on classroom management that I’m hoping to spend time improving later this year. Right now, the course includes pages and pages of snippets of research findings on classroom management. It’s great info, but it’s so boring that I couldn’t even finish reading it myself. I’d love to see what I can do for a low-tech game that gives learners a chance to apply that research in a simulated classroom and have consequences for their actions.

Not a big philosophical goal, I know, but this question seemed to lend itself to the practical goal and how I’m hoping to work to improve.

What do you want to do better as a learning professional?

Technorati Tags: interactivity, goal, Learning+Circuits, LCBQ, Captivate, Flash

Collaborative Learning Trends

These are my live-blogged notes from the webinar Emerging Trends in Collaborative Learning from the WebEx/eLearning Guild Online eLearning Summit. My comments are in italics.

Speakers

• Heidi Fisk, Co-Founder, The eLearning Guild
• Brent Schlenker, the Emerging Technologies Analyst, The eLearning Guild

How do you define “collaborative learning”?

Brent showed his online profile in different places

I’m impressed that he’s a level 40 orc in WOW. The fact that I’m impressed by that probably makes me a g33k…

Heidi Fisk noted that she isn’t involved with so many new technologies b/c she has difficulty typing. Good example of why mobility is part of the accessibility considerations and why we should think about that more.

New technologies are all about connecting people-that’s the underlying theme of all these new innovations

The focus on “You” (Time magazine, personal branding)

YOUniverse-what does your digital presence look like?

• Consume
• Connect/Collaborate
• Create

Maybe the “editable” from Brent’s earlier list should be “collaboratable”-not that it’s a real word…Hmmm…I still am not quite happy with that.

Looked at generational trends for technology

eLearning Guild technology usage

• Synchronous e-Learning: 65%
• Wikis: 31%
• Blogs: 22%
• Chat rooms: 24%
• Mobile Learning: 19%
• Podcasts: 17%

eLearning Guild is an example of collaborative data sharing, pulled dynamically

Synchronous Learning trends (although new engine in 2005, so data isn’t directly comparable)

• 2001: 13%
• 2002: 18%
• 2004: 25%
• 2005: 38%
• 2007: 65%

Learning 0.1: Physical classroom in 1941, chalkboard, no

Learning 1.0: standard info (expert content, one direction, static, centralized). Few content creators, many content consumers

Learning 2.0: Dynamic, decentralized, loosely joined networks, learners create & enhance content; rip, mix, feed

“Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy”

Five Ables from before:

• Searchable
• Editable
• Linkable
• Tagable
• Feedable

First 3 “ables” are from the Cluetrain Manifesto

Informal Learning

New hires need more formal, structured courses, less informal

Company gurus use more informal support & conversations, less formal classrooms

Brent is showing this as very low informal at the beginning, but I’m not sure I agree with that. I think there is a lot of informal learning for new hires too

Google Trends shows searches for “instructional design” dropping over time

What does that mean? Are there fewer learning professionals using instructional design? Perhaps the old ideas of what instructional design is aren’t working anymore. We need to find new ways to be of value.

Blogs, Wikis, RSS

Got a phone call-darn, I missed what Brent said about blogs, wikis, and RSS. I’ll have to catch it in the recording. (Unless Brent would be so nice as to summarize what he said here in the comments…)

Internal Wikis: Intel as the example

• 6000+ articles
• Intel Acronyms to help people
• Intel History created by the employees-better than what any single group of people could have done

Blogs let you share ideas and get feedback from all over the world

Text messaging took off much faster in other countries where the infrastructure was better for that than in the US.

Where to start using new technology? Feed reader/aggregator, start learning RSS

Feed readers are a good way to get a high level scan of a lot of the information

Showed iGoogle, Netvibes, etc.-learning dashboards

“Nobody can tell you what the matrix is. You have to experience it for yourself.” Morpheus, The Matrix

You have to go out and experience it, engage with others, create and share

Several questions in the chat about accuracy in wikis-people seem to be very worried about that. The moderator suggests lots of self-policing

Find the grassroots people to start trying something and encourage them to share what they are doing. You can’t just tell people “this is what we’re doing” like a new accounting system-you have to build from the bottom, not from the top down. Even if it fails, what have you lost if the tool is free?

Collaborative Immersive 3-D Environments

Games vs. Virtual Spaces

“You can learn more about a man in one hour of play than in one year of conversation.” Plato

Immersive 3-D environments require you to work together, be engaged, solve problems

Most kids play games, lots of adults do too

MMORPG is a virtual team

Screenshot of 40 people in a WOW raiding party-this is 40 people from around the world with different skills working to accomplish something. Lots of logistics even though it’s a game.

Second Life is a virtual space without specific game objectives like WOW. Watched NASA shuttle launch video within virtual world–a “matrix” moment for Brent

Example of Second Life training: Crowd control training where there’s no danger of people getting hurt. It’s easy for learners to figure out how to “game the system” if it’s non-player characters. If real people are the ones playing the role of disrupters in the crowd, it’s harder to game the system.

Technorati Tags: elearning+guild, Brent+Schlenker, collaboration, MMORPG, web2.0, elearning2.0

GGG4L: Academic Applications

Welcome to stop #12 on Karl Kapp’s blog book tour for Gadgets, Games, and Gizmos for Learning.

Although Karl’s book is generally focused on knowledge transfer in the corporate world, I’m finding a wealth of ideas for my work in the academic arena as well. Chapter 2: It’s In The Game and Chapter 3: The Virtual Apprentice both got my attention because they are really about the instructional design and the pedagogy behind developing games for learning. Karl separates knowledge into six levels and provides examples of games at each level.

• Declarative
• Concepts
• Rules
• Procedures
• Principles
• Problem Solving

However, his examples are primarily related to business, so I found myself thinking about how to apply that to my own work in academics. Because the courses I develop are for K-12 teachers, my examples tend to be in that area. I hope that this will help spark some ideas for you to see how you can build on the examples Karl has given and apply them in your own work.

For each of the 6 levels, I’m going to give a brief description of what type of content is covered, a business example from Karl’s book, and an education example.

Declarative

This is the lowest level knowledge: facts, jargon, and acronyms. Use casual games to teach it (word search, crossword puzzles, Jeopardy, matching, etc.)
Business example: Word search with terminology related to effective communication
Education example: Matching game with learning theories and people who developed them (match the person to the theory)

Concepts

Conceptual knowledge roughly corresponds to the comprehension or understanding level of Bloom’s. It’s deeper than just memorizing definitions; it’s about putting related ideas or things together.
Business example: Sorting game to sort business mail into categories: Confidential, Personal, Business, and Bulk.
Education example: Sorting game to identify primary and secondary sources (this is something I hope to actually develop for my course about online primary sources)

Rules

Rules are “relationships between two or more concepts” by Karl’s definition. Something in the format “If A happens, do B” is a rule.
Business example: Board game to teach inventory rules (answer questions right to advance on the board)
Education example: Basic statistics information for analyzing research could be taught in a game. If the data looks like X, there’s a positive correlation so you can do Y. (I’m not sure about this one–I admit the idea of rules that are always the same for teachers was harder for me to come up with. I suppose you could do something within a particular district in new teacher orientation for the rules for reporting discipline incidents.)

Procedures

Sequence of steps to complete a process
Business example: Simulation of a physical procedure for running manufacturing equipment
Education example: Software simulations (for the LMS, creating a blog, recording and publishing a podcast, using Skype, etc.)

Principles

Guidelines that don’t have a specific order to be followed. Which guideline you follow depends on the context.
Business example: Social simulator with an open-ended work environment to practice leadership skills
Education example: Social simulator with an open-ended classroom environment to practice supporting different learning styles or student needs. (This is borderline between principles and problem-solving in my mind; it could go either way depending on how you set up the simulation.)

Problem Solving

Apply what you already know to a new situation to solve a problem. This is about scenarios and cases; it should involve identifying the right problem as well as solving it.
Business example: Simulation for managing a virtual team. (Karl also has an example of teaching Spanish by dropping people into a virtual world where they interact with people. I loved this idea and think it could be either for business or educational environments.)
Education example: Classroom simulation with various discipline and learning problems to practice classroom management skills.

These idea are all just jumping-off points, but I do feel like I’m starting see a number of different ways games could be integrated into the courses I develop. Granted, I’ve got a lot of logistical issues to work out, but reading the book is opening up possibilities. I’d love to hear from anyone who has successfully developed games for their classrooms, especially in an academic environment.

Technorati Tags: GGG4L, karl+kapp, games, simulations, learning, education

Online Networking in Courses

These are my notes from the presentation MySpace is not YourSpace: The Promise and Pitfalls of Online Social Networking at the Conference for Distance Learning and Teaching last week. The presenters were Alan Foley and Hal Meeks.The slides from the presentation are available as a pdf. Late Update: You can get the audio with the slides now as well.

Two ideas in particular from this presentation really struck me:

• Online can be great. Several presenters, including the first keynote speaker, mentioned the idea that we don’t have to ask any more whether online can be “as good as” face-to-face learning because the research shows that it’s pedagogy and teaching methods, not technology, that influences learning. Alan made a great point though; let’s not just settle for online being “as good as” face-to-face&emdash;let’s figure out how to use technology to create teaching methods that wouldn’t be possible face-to-face so that online is great learning.
• Our technologies structure our learning. A typical LMS encourages structuring learning in one way (with units and discussion boards and read-write-reflect). Blogs and wikis encourage a different kind of structure, but it is still a structure and we should be conscious of that.

Here’s the notes from the presentation (my side comments in italics):

Not a how to presentation, although there is some of that
How social networking tools can capture possibilities in distance education
Construct and reconstruct the teaching and learning environment
No significant difference research—we should be striving for a better experience, not just equal, with online learning (I love this idea—this is what I want too!)

Flickr for rapid sharing of content—visual journal of events
World of Warcraft as social construct

• avatar
• guilds
• interact with other players

YouTube (emokid21ohio)
MySpace—showed a band

Do they fit in a learning environment?

• engagement
• simple to publish
• accessibility (both 508 and other—anyone can play)

Questions to ask:

• Are online systems “just as good”?
• Does it have to accomplish the same goals?
• What can we learn?

Rethinking teaching for online
Standard teaching models are based on scientific practices

• constructivism
• behaviorism
• cognitivism
• progressivism

Problems involving IDs in creating games—game designers say IDs make games not fun
IDs do systematic and predictable—not everything can be predictable—social constructs aren’t predictable. Models don’t consider all social and cultural aspects.

“Teaching systems assume [certain types of] student learning interactions”
How students and teachers interact

Term used to be distance education b/c it was about space and geography
Now more about online education—about the tools, not the distance b/c lots of online students are local

“Tools define interaction”

• If you have a test, you emphasize timing and one right answer

Online courseware encourages certain types of learning styles and objectives
Not as good at “unquantifiable learning”

Technology shapes learning spaces
PowerPoint shapes content
Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (pamphlet, not a book) Edward Tufte
Tufte concludes that PPT is bad
David Byrne thinks there is potential for exploration and ways of using tools

Teacher-student hierarchy
We have a legacy in physical classrooms from old desks in rows—maybe online lets us get away from that old legacy and create new practice (nice idea)

The medium molds the messages

Roles in e-learning are often static and defined. Chat forums outside of course settings don’t have same hierarchy, more dynamic. Possible to create richer interactions between students and faculty. They say even an LMS can be used in exciting ways.

Showed using del.icio.us with a CMS and blogs for a course. Students preferred using blogs; Alan aggregated feeds to keep track. Said it was harder for him but students were more engaged.

“Online social constructs are disruptive both pedagogically and conceptually.”
Walter Benjamin “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”—how art is affected by ability to reproduce through lithographs and photographs

Need for proximity—part of why SL interest in online education
SL is comfortable for educators b/c they can create a traditional classroom in a virtual environment—it feels more real than LMS

When we translate physical places into virtual places, they are not the same thing—they are transformed. If you try to enforce rules to make it like the “real world,” you will be disappointed—it isn’t the “real world.” It doesn’t have the same rules—and it shouldn’t.

How do we fulfill the promise of not as good as, but superior?

Blogs inside an LMS isn’t necessarily the same—maybe it needs to be out in the world

One of the problems with the assumption of the net gen is that everyone has that access and experience, and that isn’t true.

Other literacies—textual and visual literacies
YouTube—yes, it’s a video which is visual, but all the commentary and everything around it is text—social construct
Students can act as critics of YouTube even if they aren’t creating videos—creating videos isn’t the only way to use YouTube

Social notetaking—students in a big lecture post in a wiki to share with others

LMS can house and centralize course materials even using all the external stuff

Privacy is still a concern—even bigger for K-12
Intellectual property

LMS creates a box for content—so does Facebook. It isn’t that one is good and the other bad, it’s recognizing that these constructs shape what we do and thinking about the pedagogy that we can use.

Update: I’ve been thinking more about this topic and have written more in a new post: Facebook as LMS?

Technorati Tags: CDTL07, myspace, socialnetworking, e-learning, onlinelearning, highered, education, lms, web2.0

Meeting the team at CDTL07

I’ve had the pleasure in the last few days to meet my coworkers in person for the first time. It is one of the oddities of telecommuting that you can build relationships with people over the course of months and never get to meet them face to face. We’ve shared pictures, so we knew what we looked like, but it’s still nice to get to see people face to face. I really enjoyed just being able to hang out with them all too; making those connections with people about what we do outside of work is fun.

The conference we attended together is the Conference for Distance Teaching and Learning in Madison, WI. I have notes from a number of presentations that I’m hoping to post at some point in the next week. I attended several valuable workshops covering topics such as using social networking applications in education and managing the development of Flash games. I saw a great demonstration of a scenario-based course with lots of real-world applications that I want to try to imitate in some of my own development. A few of the workshops were disappointing, mostly because I think the conference as a whole was more geared towards faculty and administrators in higher ed rather than designers and developers. That isn’t a bad thing, of course, it just wasn’t exactly what I was looking for. Of course, some of that is simply that I picked poorly for some of the workshops I chose to attend, and I should have walked out of a few when I knew they weren’t what I was looking for. That’s a learning experience in and of itself though.

More conference notes will be posted in the next few days.

Technorati Tags: CDTL07, e-learning, distance learning, telecommute, highered

New Features in Captivate 3

These are my notes about the "Rapid E-Learning with Adobe Captivate" webinar this morning, presented by Silke Fleischer. The recording of the webinar should be available within about a week. This is pretty much live blogged, so please forgive the brevity of the points here. I was really focusing on what the new features are to help decide if it’s worth upgrading. My comments are in all caps.

What’s Possible in Captivate 3?

• Branching Scenarios
• Simple Games (SHE SHOWED ONE AT THE BEGINNING BUT DIDN’T REALLY EXPLAIN HOW TO CREATE IT—THE GRAPHICS WERE CREATED ELSEWHERE BUT THE CLICKING WAS CREATED IN CAPTIVATE)
• Basic Animations
• Podcasts
• Picture Shows

Efficient:

• Multimode recording (record practice, demo, and assessment in one pass)
• Find and Replace

Effective:

• Randomized quizzing
• Question Pooling
• New Question Types
• Improved Branching with grouping

Engaging

• Better rollover
• Import PPT and keep the animation—not just static anymore

Rerecording feature for changes—only for IE6 now (SHE SAID ONLY IE6 BUT DEMOED IN IE7?) Update: Apparently I had a brain cramp. She did demo in IE6. See her comment below.

When you start the recording, you have the options for which modes you do (practice, demo, assessment)
Choose the option to save the rerecording info for later—this has to be set up at the beginning
Can rerecord to change the language—NOT USEFUL FOR ME, BUT COULD BE USEFUL FOR OTHERS

New caption types available—MORE VISUAL VARIATION

Changes in Questions

• Can set the answers to shuffle in a matching or multiple choice question
• New Type: Hotspot question—click a hotspot on an image—can include multiple hotspots
• New Type: Sequence

Question Pools

• Allows you to randomize the order of questions
• Can mix specific question with random
• Q: How do you do it? A: Insert Random Question Slide, one slide for each question you want
• Quiz questions can be copied and pasted from one file to another—new feature (had to be recreated manually in CP2)

Rollover Slidelets

• Different than a rollover caption or image
• A rollover can be a mini slide with its own embedded timeline
• Just in time info—text, image, video all possible
• Partially transparent look by default

Import from PowerPoint: You can animate concepts in PPT and then bring the animation into CP3

Improvements to Branching: Group slides together—IT LOOKS LIKE THE BRANCHING VIEW MAKES MORE SENSE NOW AND SHOULD BE EASIER TO NAVIGATE

Backward Compatibility: No backward compatibility; projects created in CP3 cannot be opened in CP2

Menu Builder: No updates to that; still available in the skin as in CP2 (I NEED TO PLAY WITH THIS FEATURE MORE—MIGHT BE EASIER THAN WHAT I’VE BEEN DOING)

Games: Check out templates available in the Adobe Exchange

Technorati Tags: captivate, e-learning, simulation, game, interactivity

Free Subscription

If you enjoyed this post, consider a free subscription so you can receive automatic updates. Don’t worry, I hate spam as much as you do, so I’ll never share your email address with anyone.

  Subscribe by RSS feed

  Subscribe by Email

Flash Games, Just for Fun

Cheri Toledo pointed out a site called Orisinal. It’s got a bunch of little Flash-based games. None of them are designed to be overly challenging; Cheri says she uses them for mental breaks.

It’s nice to look at some ideas for a variety of interactions. I admit found some of them confusing; I couldn’t quite figure out the point of a few games. But, I also didn’t spend much time trying to understand them. Still, it’s valuable to have sites like this for inspiration. We have the possibilities of making multimedia interactions in e-learning that are so much more than just multiple choice or drag and drop matching. Even relatively simple tasks can be made a more pleasant and engaging with some variety.

Cheri says:

I’ve used it to show my Instructional Technology Design students what can be done with Flash and lots of time.

Lots and lots of time, and a lot more skill in Flash than I have. But I’m slowly working on improving that.

If you need a mental break or some visual inspiration, check it out.

Technorati Tags: flash, games, interactivity, e-learning

My Top Ten Tools

Jane Hart has asked a number of people to write about their favorite tools, for either e-learning or personal learning and working. Of my top 10, 8 are free tools, and 3 of those are open source. Without further ado, here’s my list:

1. Firefox:
I started using Firefox as my browser because it’s more stable and faster than IE, and has been since it was called Mozilla and was only in beta. Having the ability to add extensions and customize the application is what really keeps me using it.

2. Gmail:
I’ve used a number of web-based email programs, but Gmail is by far my favorite. Sorting by conversations is much easier to follow, plus of course the search ability is great. I also use the Better Gmail Firefox add-on to tweak the interface, improve security, and add features.

3. Google Reader:
I admit it; I check my Google Reader pretty obsessively. I know that I simply wouldn’t read and learn as much without it. I star posts to remind myself to review a post or write about it later. My shared posts are shown on my blog to point out interesting reads.

4. Wikispaces:
I’ve never met any of my coworkers in person; everyone on our team telecommutes. Wikispaces is one of our primary documentation and collaboration tools. It’s easy to post tips, resources, processes, and brainstorming. The RSS feed lets me know whenever changes are made, which is a huge help.

5. Google Docs & Spreadsheets:
I know that the Google love must be getting a bit tiresome, but Google Docs really makes collaboration easier. During the course development process, it’s more convenient to use Google Docs than for my SME (Subject Matter Expert) and me to send dozens of Word attachments back and forth. I always know we both have the most current version of our documents. The formatting is quirky, especially when moving documents back and forth between Word and Google Docs, and the Revision Tracking seems a little clunky as well. It isn’t my first choice for a polished final document, but for building the drafts along the way it’s very effective.

6. Dreamweaver:
I know that Jane’s E-Learning Pick of the Day is usually a web-based service, but Dreamweaver really is the best choice for my needs developing online courses. Library files that automatically update multiple files across a course are huge timesavers.

7. Skype:
Skype has been an indispensable collaboration tool for our team. We use it for weekly meetings as well as quick calls and chats.

8. Captivate:
Captivate is my first choice for developing software application training. I was amazed at how quickly I could put together a rough interactive simulation the first time I tried it. For non-software training, Captivate is good but not outstanding. However, the more time I spend with it, the more I discover is possible.

9. Pidgin:
For instant messaging, I use Pidgin (formerly Gaim). This is an open source application which allows you to view multiple IM accounts from several places in a single window. I use Google Talk, AIM, Yahoo, and MSN, and I’d hate to have that many windows open all the time. Pidgin simplifies that for me.

10. Diigo:
I use Diigo as my primary social bookmarking tool. The daily blog posting has better formatting than other tools, and I have more control because I can post as a draft first. The blog post also includes my highlighted quotes from the page. The forwarding feature is a quick way to share sites with others.

Update: This list is also posted on the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies site. That version includes icons for each of my favorites.

Technorati Tags: e-learning, tools, firefox, gmail, google+reader, wikispaces, google+docs, dreamweaver, skype, captivate, pidgin, diigo, jane+hart