• Add Diigo To Google Readers New “Send To” Feature | (jeff)isageek.net

  Directions on how to add Diigo as an option for the “Send to” feature within Google Reader

  tags: diigo, rss

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

It’s time for that annual ritual of looking back at the year. Unlike last year, this year I’m actually reviewing before the new year starts.

What did I do this year? A few things come to mind.

• In January, we officially launched Sakai as our LMS, marking the end of a long process of choosing the right system and converting all our courses.
• In April, I presented with my colleagues at the TCC conference on our LMS selection and implementation process.
• In June, I found out that my job situation was not especially secure. Not coincidentally, June was the month I finally put together a portfolio of my work.
• In July, my column on using wikis for ID process documentation was published in the eLearning Guild’s Learning Solutions magazine–my first official published article.
• In August, my husband and I closed on our first house. No more renting!
• In December, I started a new job. It’s been a somewhat slow start, as I had no computer for the first two weeks, but hopefully I’ll have some more to write about soon.

These are my top posts according to the social signals measured by eLearning Learning:

1. Blogging in a Walled Garden
2. Why a Wiki?
3. Google Wave in 10 Minutes
4. Sakai 3 Development Process
5. Google Wonder Wheel & Other Search Options
6. TCC09: Podcasting with Section 508
7. TCC09: Digital Storytelling in a Web 2.0 World
8. LearnTrends: Microlearning
9. LearnTrends: Personal Knowledge Management
10. CCK09: Connectivism and Constructivism

If I was looking for evidence that live blogging during conferences and webinars provides value, I think this sums it up quite nicely. Half of my top posts by this measure are notes from presentations I attended.

By the number of views, my top posts are mostly related to instructional design careers. The posts from my original series on instructional design skills and how to get started in the field are still some of the most popular here, even though they are now over two years old. What Does an Instructional Designer Do? ranks pretty highly in the Google search results for “instructional designer,” currently #3 (behind Wikipedia & Indeed).

My top search terms are clearly focused on instructional design (with a bit of traffic to my March 2007 cyberbullying post):

Looking at just the numbers, my number of views didn’t increase dramatically in 2009. In 2008, I had about 61,000 total views; this year I had about 79,000. I went from about 160 daily views to 215. Those are respectable numbers; not outstanding, and certainly not enough to make me a big-name blogger or give me delusions of making a full-time living from my blog. But not bad.

I’m happy to see that my number of subscribers has more than doubled though. Figuring out how many RSS subscribers you have on a WordPress blog can be challenging, but adding everything up from my multiple feeds looks like I have over 1000 subscribers. That feels like a more relevant number to me than the number of views on the site. Subscribers are long-term readers, where many of my views are just search engine traffic from people who will never be back. Subscribers are people who have decided my blog provides (at least some) long-term value to them.

I don’t know what the new year will bring, but I’m looking forward to the challenges of 2010. Happy New Year everyone!

Image Credit: cc licensed flickr photo shared by uhhhlaine

• LONG VIEW: ROBERT BRINKERHOFF, THE | Training & Development | Find Articles at BNET

  Interview with Brinkerhoff on the research history of the Success Case Method and evaluating training

  tags: brinkerhoff, training, evaluation

• Success Case Method: Summary

  Two-page summary of Brinkerhoff’s Success Case Method for evaluating training programs

  tags: evaluation, training, brinkerhoff

• Sprixi – Free images to choose and use!

  Visual search for public domain and Creative Commons images (only commercial friendly CC images are included)

  tags: creativecommons, images, photos

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Fair Use Evaluator

  Step by step method to guide people through the process of determining whether a use constitutes fair use under US copyright law. You can create a time-stamped PDF documenting your analysis in case you ever need to support your claim.

  tags: copyright

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Instructional Design for Online Learning – Instructional Design Models

  A collection of instructional design models and theories in 4 categories: behaviorist, cognitivist, constructivist, and prescriptive models

  tags: instructionaldesign, e-learning, constructivism, addie

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• eLearn: Best Practices – Sound Your Best in Virtual Trainings

  Tips for using your voice effectively in webinars or for recording audio for e-learning

  tags: e-learning, training, audio, synchronous

• Education: Learning styles debunked

  Summary of a new report criticizing the lack of validity and reliability in learning styles research

  tags: learningstyles, learning, education

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Adventures in Second Life – 2009 – ASTD

  How IBM is using Second Life for training to help learners grasp concepts that are hard to teach in other formats. One example given is a large model of a data flow so participants could walk through the same pathways that data would follow.

  tags: secondlife, e-learning, training

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Kapp Notes: Accidental Instructional Designers May Want to Just Say No

  Karl Kapp revisits the value of instructional design degrees, arguing that people who accidentally find themselves in the field should decline to develop learning until they’ve been trained. Karl also identifies what he feels is the most important skill instructional designers should have.

  tags: instructionaldesign, career

  • So, to me, the most important skill an instructional designer can have is being able to apply instructional strategies. To know when to use a mnemonic and when to use an analogy. When to model the behavior to be learned and when to provide a check list. When Constructivism is a good theorietical underpinning for a topic and when a Cognitivism-based approach is necessary.

    Instructional designers add value by serving as catalyst who accelerate the process of learning for individuals.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Talent Management – Fielding Objections to Telecommuting

  Common objections to telecommuting and how to respond to them. Good answers, but I wish citations were given rather than just “Statistics show…” or “Recent surveys have shown…” If you used these arguments, you’d need to do some additional research to back up the claims.

  tags: telecommuting, career

• Accessibility: How Many Disabled Web Users Are There? | Practical eCommerce

  Some US stats on disabilities that affect web accessibility. Links to UN, UK, and Australian stats are also included.

  tags: accessibility, webdesign

  • The most commonly discussed disabilities affecting website accessibility are sight and hearing impairments. These specific impairments encompass 6.8 percent of the population age 15 years and older – and climb to encompass 21.3 percent of the population when you look specifically at the population over 65, according to the 2005 report. Eight-point-two percent of this same population is listed as having difficulty grasping objects– which affects the use of a mouse.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Two Ways to Reclaim Your Feeds from FeedBurner

  Get rid of Feedburner’s link pollution–make URLs in your feed show up as your real URLs

  tags: rss, blog

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.