Wikis for Improving Productivity

I’m liveblogging the webinar Growing in a Down Market with PBwiki. My comments are in italics.

Presenter: Teo Mayes, CTO RMC Vanguard

They used UStream for the audio, in addition to the typical phone line. I know I’m a little late to the party, but this is actually the first time I’ve used UStream. So far, so good!

RMC Vanguard is a mortgage company–able to do major increases in their business even with the economy not good for mortgage companies right now. Significant increases in productivity with a wiki.

The productivity increases are really what interests me in this webinar. We use the wiki for our team, but I wonder what we can do to be more effective with it, as well as how we can help other departments in the company.

Templates

Use templates on the wiki to make it easier to structure pages so people can be familiar with it. Without some structure, it’s harder for people to contribute.

Created a specific template structure for contact info

Search: Search function is really important–used heavily

Document Repository: Use wiki to hold templates and documents. Used color coding to show current/prior versions of documents

Security: They have passwords visible on the wiki, but that’s OK b/c the security of the wiki is OK–must log in to view the confidential content.

Getting People to Use the Wiki

They used to keep contact info for vendors in Outlook, but had problems keeping consistent across multiple contact cards. Then used spreadsheet on a central server, but people working from home couldn’t access it. Wiki solves the problem of creating one central location with easy access.

Problem: Industry has high turnover rate, plus experienced loan officers don’t want to take time to mentor newbies b/c they work on commission only.

Solution:

• Detailed how to pages for common problems (like accessing outlook from home)
• FAQ–constantly growing–lets people work rather than answering the same questions all the time

Productivity

How do you quantify this? Hard to tell–how do you determine time saved by questions going to the FAQ instead of answering by a person? How do you quantify value of people having accurate and current information rather than just what you hear from another person? Helps keep current information b/c things change so fast.

Improves customer service b/c people have the right information–you aren’t working on a mortgage and discover halfway through that the rules have changed. Clients say the process is very smooth; he attributes this to the technology.

Won national BBB award for excellence

Questions & Answers

Q: How do you feel about this critical company intellectual property being hosted by someone else?
A: They did a lot of research. No information about clients like SSN stored on the wiki. Security levels of PBwiki are sufficient for the financial industry.

Q: Who helped you set it up?
A: Change is hard in organizations; it took time for it to meet everyone’s needs. He took several months by himself to create a basic structure, but he would recommend having a team plan the initial structure. Because basic structure was there already, people were more likely to add and update; they wouldn’t have done this with blank pages and no templates.

Q: Was there support at the executive level?
A: Yes, there was. They already have people working virtually, so this was an easy sell. It has already paid for itself in increased productivity in less than a year.

Q: Did you have a wiki before?
A: No, they just used central file sharing. He had never done anything with a wiki before. This is a good case study of a leader trying something new for him too.

Q: Do you backup the wiki? Do you have version tracking for revisions?
A: PBwiki has revision tracking built in; they don’t do any other backups on their own. PBwiki does backups on 3 servers plus offsite backups, so businesses don’t need to do it. OK, this is a sales pitch, but it’s an important question. You can download a zip file to your own servers if you want, but they don’t feel it’s necessary.

Q: Do your employees pay to use the wiki, or does the company cover the cost?
A: Company covers it That would be required to get people to use it

Q: How big is the wiki? Any technical issues related to size?
A: 350 pages, no technical issues. They’ve made feature requests but no problems.

Q: How do you handle administration?
A: Company restraint keeps it from being a free-for-all. Changes are documented so you can see who made it, so people never make inappropriate comments. He monitors all changes so he can revert if there’s an issue.

Q: Set up?
A: Search feature takes care of a lot of organization–you don’t need as tight a structure when search is so good. Provide links for most used pages. Folder structure helps for security; different departments have different access. Otherwise they don’t force much structure.

Q: When first implementing, did any early adopters resist it? How do you deal?
A: Yes, there’s always people who resist change.

1. Made sure that the information they needed on a day-to-day basis was already on the wiki before giving access.
2. Provided training
3. Removed info from old location after a short grace period–forced to use the wiki

Q: How much training did users need?
A: Minimal training. Small groups, no more than 10 people at a time to manage questions. 10-15 minute sessions: showed email invite, how to log in, home page, navigation & search, edit, create page. Creating pages wasn’t emphasized in early training; has done more training later as needed.

Q: I have administrators who don’t like to get the constant updates via email. Do you by chance send a digest notice of changes out to folks who don’t want the constant notices?
A: Yes, PBwiki has options for individual users to set preferences for notifications

Q: Fee structure for PBwiki
A: For business, $8/user/month. Read-only users are 80 cents/month though.

Q: Does Teo maintain the wiki by himself?
A: It really isn’t a highly maintained wiki; he doesn’t need to go in to check it regularly. He watches the notifications. Operations manager goes in each day to update info needed by multiple people, but it takes 30 seconds. Big collaborative effort to maintain it; it’s not necessary for him to do it by himself.

Q: What advantage do you see to this environment rather than a structured document management?
A: He had an idea of what he wanted to do. PBwiki was easy, especially for accessibility for multiple people to help keep it updated. Also likes using widgets; they have pictures from company events hosted on Bubble but viewable through the wiki.

Q: How did you set up the template page?
A: PBwiki provides some base structure. They customized and saved their own templates. Document repository is one example

Someone in the audience commented that in their small business, they have banned email attachments since implementing a wiki. Someone else noted that email volume is down 30% with the wiki

Q: Why PBwiki and not a free wiki?
A: Security levels are necessary for their industry. Backups also important. PBwiki was also responsive as a vendor.

Q: How did you make PBwiki known to your partners?
A: At this point, it’s just internal, not shared with vendors.

Q: Do you look at metrics for activity on the wiki?
A: Right now, just a page counter on the home page. Not something that is tracked much now. B/c it’s an information source, they don’t need to require people to use the wiki–they may not have any questions. The culture has changed so when people are asked questions, the response is “Have you checked the wiki?” Internally reinforces use of wiki informally.

Q: Can you upload videos & audio?
A: They do photos. Other multimedia is possible, but they aren’t really using that yet. Drawback for video presentations is time limit of video on YouTube. Suggestion was to use Blip.tv instead.

Q: Do you see this as a knowledge management tool? Did you set out to use it for that?
A: That wasn’t exactly the main problem they were trying to solve when they started, but it has turned out that way. Most important was single location that could be accessed by remote loan officers; it met that need and grew.

Q: Have you posted a code of conduct for the wiki?
A: No, they haven’t had a need. It’s a tight-knit company, about 100 employees. As they continue to grow, they may need to.

Q: What is the number one feature that has helped you in this down market?
A: Down market has pushed them to do this; better to make changes like this during a slow time. Key thing is being able to access up-to-date, specific information for each loan scenario even though it changes on a daily basis. Being able to find out guideline changes for loans. Needs to be fast enough to do the research while you’re on the phone with a client so they can answer customer questions immediately.

Technorati Tags: PBwiki, productivity, changemanagement

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

Wetpaint Wikis in Plain English

The folks at Common Craft have been creating videos for businesses. Their latest is for Wetpaint wikis, a site I’ve been exploring for our courses as a potential alternative for Wikispaces. This video is less about the technology and more about why someone would create a wiki: to share something they’re passionate about. Although it isn’t directly related to education, I think there is still some value in having people view this video to “get” the concept. Wetpaint was very easy to set up, and they do have templates for class wikis that could be useful in some situations.

One gem from the video: They compared a wiki to a potluck, where everyone brings something special to the table.

Technorati Tags: wiki, video, wetpaint, common+craft

Discussion Boards and Wikis as “Galleries”

I’m not sure why, but lately I’ve been seeing a lot of discussion board assignments that aren’t really discussions. They’re galleries. People do an individual assignment, then they post their work to the discussion board to get peer feedback. It’s not that peer feedback is a bad thing, but really, are you actually having a conversation that way? Probably not. It’s more like if everyone in a physical classroom hung their work on the walls and we all walked around to look at what people did. It’s a gallery or bulletin board, not a conversation.

Like a lot of online schools, we rely on asynchronous threaded discussion forums for many of our activities. I think those forums can actually provide some very valuable learning experiences. They can be a way for people to learn from each other and see different perspectives. Discussions can help build a sense of community.

I really dislike discussion boards where basically everyone is going to post the same thing. “Post your definition of organizational culture to the discussion board.” Boring. Seriously, it’s bad enough to make the instructor read 30 marginally different versions of the same thing; why make a whole class suffer? I want discussion board questions to at least provide a way for people to express a personal perspective or draw on their own experience. Ideally, I prefer discussion board questions where people are really discussing and probably disagreeing with one another. A question that’s messy and doesn’t have a single right answer makes for a much more interesting and thought-provoking discussion.

I just don’t feel like galleries are a very effective use of the discussion board. Wikis seem like a better technology for that; everyone can easily post their work, and comments can be added on the discussion page. The comments or peer feedback are less the focus than the original project, and I think that’s OK. A wiki means you can take the feedback and revise your work, and it’s easy to track the changes. Many of our individual projects are lesson plans, so by creating a wiki we also create a collection of lesson plans can continue to access after the course is finished.

We’re trying out using a wiki this way in a course that just started this week, so I should have some information in a few months about how it goes. I’m curious what other people do for their online courses though. Do you use peer feedback? If so, how do you have students share the information and feedback?

Technorati Tags: discussion, wiki, asynchronous+learning, e-learning, peer+feedback

Update: For some reason, this particular post seems to be attracting a bunch of spam (in German, for a job posting–the same thing over and over but from different email addresses). While Akismet usually catches all the spam, this particular one is getting through so I have to manually delete it every time. I’ve been hit several times today alone on this post. Therefore, I’m turning off comments for this post only. I hate to shut down a discussion, but I’m quite frustrated at the moment. If you’d like to continue discussing this, feel free to go to April’s blog where I replied to her comments here. You’re also welcome to post to your own blog and link back. Thanks for understanding.

Wikis & Emerging Web 2.0 E-Learning Communities, Part 3

This is Part 3 of my notes from the webinar Wikis & Emerging Web 2.0 E-Learning Communities. My notes are in all caps.

Jeff Brainard, Socialtext Director of Marketing

What to look for in a wiki

• easy to use
• create and find content
• integrate with other technology (RSS, multimedia, etc.)
• other ways to view information (blogs, etc.) I’M NOT SURE ABOUT THIS—MAYBE WHEN I SEE IT I’LL UNDERSTAND MORE. WIKIS AND BLOGS SERVE DIFFERENT PURPOSES THOUGH

Features of Socialtext IT’S THE DIRECTOR OF MARKETING, SO I SUPPOSE I SHOULDN’T BE SURPRISED BY THE COMMERCIAL…I DIDN’T TAKE MANY NOTES FOR THIS PART

• Granular permission control
• Advanced search & tagging

Places to use wikis

• Intranet
• Knowledge Base
• Group Collaboration
• Manage projects & processes
• THIS IS WHAT WE USE IT FOR—DOCUMENTING SOPs
• Extranet
• Internet
• Public knowledge bases
• Self-service portals
• Social communities
• Mobility

Project Management Scenario

• Project summary page
• Team member pages
• Track progress
• Keep notes

Knowledge Wiki

• Information—like for a help desk THIS IS WHAT MY HUSBAND NEEDS WITH HIS TEAM. THEIR HELP DESK DOCUMENTATION IS NEVER UP TO DATE.

Showed integration within another portal (could be integrated within Bb or other LMS)

Reduce email overload

Instead of lots of emails back and forth, do discussions on the wiki

Everyone always has the current version because it’s on the wiki

Dynamic Intranet

Get experts to put info on the wiki instead of everyone always emailing & asking the expert

Glossary for internal jargon & acronyms

Wiki widgets to include other media in the wiki

Socialtext has mobile and offline access

Q&A:  (All three presenters answering questions, not sure who said what)

https://www.socialtext.net/medialiteracy

Ask critical questions about sources

Not just wikipedia, but all sources

 

Socialtext is a platform for large applications: enterprise-wise, campus-wide, etc.

Use open source if you can manage it yourself; go commercial if you want to have someone else host and manage it

 

Controversial topics

• You can track who changed what
• People can delete what they don’t agree with
• Getting to a NPOV can be pretty nasty behind the scenes
• Really controversial issues are better on a blog or forum where all comments are preserved

Q: Correlation between wikis and grades or retention?

A: Peer evaluation may have some correlation to improved grades (anecdotal, not formal research

 

Q: How do you make people comfortable with the technology?

A: One answered that they are doing “underground resistance” by just giving it to the students and letting them take it with them elsewhere

Requires faculty to change their understanding about what it means to teach: do faculty have to give all information, or is it still teaching when faculty provide means to find information?

Need to experiment

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of my notes.

Technorati Tags: wiki, highered, web20

Wikis & Emerging Web 2.0 E-Learning Communities, Part 2

This is Part 2 of my notes from the webinar Wikis & Emerging Web 2.0 E-Learning Communities. My notes are in all caps. (I got distracted by email during some of this, so I doubt that my notes are complete.)

Howard Reingold

Used in Communication: Virtual Community & Social Media course

Has come to realize that literacies in Web 2.0 media are a big question

In the past, he used wikis to make the syllabus a living document

You have to give up part of the authority of being the professor and single expert, but that’s what’s exciting for students

Uses a lot of small teamwork as “labs”

Emphasis on learning by demonstration, then doing

Have students note what they feel to be most important from discussions on their own personal wiki pages

Assign two students each week to go through lots of scattered pages and collect the fragments together GREAT USE OF STUDENT LEADERSHIP

Uses wiki for how-to guides for using Web 2.0 technology; it changes too fast to print it in a book

https://www.socialtext.net/medialiteracy

This is a community resource, not just for his course

Wiki facilitates active note-taking during class. Students bring their laptops to class anyway; why not provide something to engage them?

Includes some multimedia content on the wiki (video etc.)

Read Part 1 and Part 3 of my notes.

Technorati Tags: wiki, highered, web20

Wikis & Emerging Web 2.0 E-Learning Communities, Part 1

These are my liveblogged notes from a webinar I attended today. I realized after the Distance Learning Conference in Madison that I’m not very good at getting my notes up later if I wait and attempt to clean them up. I feel like my liveblogging skills are pretty rough right now, but I don’t think I’ll get any better without practice.

My notes are fairly lengthy, so I’m breaking this into 3 parts: one for each speaker. The Q&A notes will be included with the last speaker. My comments are in all caps. I’ll post a link to the recording as soon as it’s available; right now the only link I can find for this webinar is the registration page. Update: Here’s the link to the archived presentation. Registration is required.

Presenters
Jerry Kane, Assistant Professor of Information Systems, Boston College
Howard Rheingold, Author and Professor at Stanford University and UC Berkeley
Jeff Brainard, Director of Marketing, Socialtext

Case Study at Boston College

Jerry Kane

 

Wiki for Computers in Management course

Started with Facebook, but wasn’t able to do enough collaboration there

Benefit: Wisdom of crowds instead of just the single expert instructor

Using wiki now as a mashup to bring other technologies together

Talked about why he likes Socialtext as the platform

How he uses it

• Wiki Functionality
• Peer review and evaluation
• “Open source” final exam
• Tracks student involvement
• RSS Feeds
• Virtual newsstands
• Links to his blog & Google reader
• Del.icio.us tags (instructor and students contribute). Creates pages to collect resources for specific topics.
• Monitors the RSS feed for the wiki to track
• Other stuff
• YouTube, Facebook, etc.

Course evals have been strong, but he doesn’t have much to compare it to

Some students list wikis as the most favorite, others list as the least favorite

More about collaboration than the tool THIS IS A GREAT POINT

Improves his workload

You have to provide incentives for people to use it; you can’t just build it and expect people to come

Grading: Gives extra points for best contributions, based on peer evaluation

You have to be willing to give up control and trust students to help with the work

Not about creating more interaction; it’s about creating higher quality interaction
LOVE THIS
DISTINCTION—GREAT JUSTIFICATION FOR USING MORE COLLABORATION

When wikis work

• Less than 150 people
• Non-controversial topics
• Common language
• Semi-formal setting
• Dynamic
  environment
• Trust & respect

Read Part 2 and Part 3 of my notes.

Technorati Tags: wikis, highered, web20

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

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

Wikipedian Protester

Brian Lamb at Abject Learning shared this comic, originally from xkcd. Hey, I haven’t had anything funny on here for a while.

Technorati Tags: wikipedia, humor, xkcd, Brian Lamb