False Starts and Learning Through Conversation: An Interview on Social Media and Learning with VCU Staff

UPDATE--Be sure to check out Britt Atwood's take on our discussion here. The other day, I had the great pleasure of doing a Skype interview with Britt Watwood, Jeff Nugent and Bud Deihl of the Virginia Commonwealth University Center for Teaching Excellence. I've been corresponding with Britt on a variety of topics for awhile and Bud and I had bonded over Jott. Through our interactions and though reading their blogs,... Read more →


Becoming a More Reflective Individual Practitioner

Yesterday I blogged about how I believe that technology--most notably blogging--has taken the concept of being a reflective practitioner to another level. Today I want to talk in more detail about that and about how we as learners can better incorporate reflection into our practices as professionals. Building Reflection Into Your Individual Learning Practices In my research on this idea, I ran across a very nice 4-page summary on reflective... Read more →


How Claudia Escribano Serves as a Digital Curator for Her Organization with "Buzzin' on the Biz"

A few weeks ago when I posted about instructional designers as digital curators, Claudia Escribano of Lifelong Learning Lab left me a comment about a bi-weekly report she posts on her company's internal blog, "Buzzin' on the Biz." It sounded like a great idea, so I asked Claudia if she could send me more information on how she does it. This is what she told me: In the year or... Read more →


Reading Groups and Learning Projects for Professional Development

Thoughts of the Personal MBA model of learning are still milling around in my brain as I find this Wikiversity Portal linking to various reading groups, which led in turn to the Wikiversity approach to learning. I've seen this before, but having the Personal MBA stuff so fresh in my brain, I saw it a little differently this time. There are a few things that are fascinating about this idea... Read more →


Job Searching the Web 2.0 Way: Setting up an Online Portfolio

In our ongoing case study of Shari, a mid-career training professional who's integrating Web 2.0 tools into her job search process, we've been looking at how Shari could use various technology tools to help her get organized. First we set up a job search dashboard and then we integrated Google Calendar, Google Alerts and Jott into her job search. Today we're going to delve into another of Shari's key job... Read more →


Job Searching the Web 2.0 Way: Organizing with Google Calendar, Google Alerts and Jott

Over the past few days I've been sharing with you the story of how I'm working with Shari, a mid-career training professional who's currently looking for a new job. Yesterday I talked about how Shari and I set up a customized job search dashboard using i-Google. Today I'm going to share some of the other tools that Shari's using to organize her job search. Google Calendar Calendars are critical for... Read more →


Welcome to Employee Learning Week: Seeing Yourself as a Learner

All week I'm planning to do a series of posts (including some great guests posts) in support of ASTD's Employee Learning Week. In today's post, I want to take a look at what I consider the backbone of professional development--seeing yourself as a learner. Some Context--School Kills Learning After 15+ years as a training professional, I've come to believe that school was the worst thing to ever happen to learning.... Read more →


A Vision of Students Today and Information R/evolution

A couple of interesting videos from Michael Wesch, the creator of The Machine is Us/ing Us who's leading a Digital Ethnography workgroup/project that's bringing together students and professors of Anthropology at Kansas State University to look at the impact of technology on human interactions. The video above is "A Vision of Students" today. It was created by the 200 students in Wesch's Intro to Cultural Anthropology class. Here's how they... Read more →


If You Don't Believe That Wikis Can Work as an Organization-wide Solution to Knowledge Sharing, Read this Article

Nathan reports on the success of a wiki as a company-wide intranet. Don't be scared away their price tag --a wiki solution can be had for much less money. Wetpaint has many of the features most nonprofits would need to use a wiki as an intranet and these are available for free. Wikispaces is another option, although it's $50/year to keep your space private. Aside from the obvious success of... Read more →


Some Tools for Making Group Blogging (and any Group Writing Project) Easier

A few months ago I wrote that the best blogging strategy for nonprofits may be a group blog, where a number of writers are all contributing to creating posts, rather than relying on a single writer. Now I want to share a few tools that can make a group blog--or any group writing project--even easier. Writing Posts with Google Docs Google Docs lets you create and share documents online, which... Read more →