I enjoy reading edubloggers. From my experience, conversations now occurring with edubloggers is several years ahead of what happens in journals and conferences. I can’t think of a more innovative, intellectually fertile space. Over the last several months, however, I’ve been evaluating the diversity of my reading. Almost overwhelmingly, I read blogs with a left-leaning slant. Now, there could be various reasons for this: progressives are more likely to adopt new technology, educators are generally left-leaning, or, the left-view of education is the more sensible one to take.

As I reported in Google Blog Search Problems , Google seems to have included the full text of blog pages (including blog rolls) in their blog search. I just saw this post which both confirms that Google changed something which is causing the problem and that then intend to fix it. According to Jeremy Hylton of the Google Blog Search team , they now index the full content of the page. This means that not only do they index the full post even if the blog publishes a partial feed, but it means that they index the non-post parts of the pages as well. This is mostly an improvement, of ...

One of the first hurdles myself and other rookie Moodle implementers have to overcome is increasing the maximum file upload size. Moodle defaults to a measly 2 MB maximum file upload size which is pretty limiting. Through my research I found that many other people struggle with the same problem especially when Moodle is installed on a hosted non dedicated server which is the situation I am in. Here's a brief rundown of how I was able to increase the max file upload size for moodle on a hosted server. The key to confusion is when you search for answers to this problem on Moodle ...

I just wanted to quickly share this article from SocialComputingMagazine.com .  The KM community has seen themselves as uniquely different from the eLearning community as well.  However, from where I'm sitting its starting to look like Social Media technologies are slowly devouring both fields...and others.  Okay, so devouring might be a strong word.  But taking the best of Social Media, Knowledge Management, eLearning, User Assistance (and others) and combining them together gives us Enterprise 2.0 solutions.  The leader in the area of Enterprise 2.0 is Andew McAfee of Harvard ...

The eLearning Guild is offering a $400 early-bird discount if you register for their March Annual Gathering by December 19th. Check it out . Note: I'll be presenting a workshop (with Roy Pollock) on Learning Measurement , and speaking several other times, so this conference is well worth your while. AND, by saving $400, you can easily afford our symposium.  ...

The OEB08 session in which I spoke was amazingly rich in content (talking about the other participants). They all had great applications making use of language technology, sms, multimedia and all combining it in mobile examples. Because I was the last one to speak, I was too nervous to take notes while they were giving it. I looked up links to them: Gavin Cooney, Learnosity , Ireland on 'Voice: The Killer Application of Mobile Learning'; Mathew James Constantine, IE Business School , Spain on 'Mind the Gap - Narrowing the Distance to the Learner' Sarah Cornelius , University of ...

The New York Times published an article today saying that college tuition may be out of reach for most Americans. This, of course, is stunning news. If true, it will rip a gaping hole in the very fabric of our society. It will also, make the job of work-learning professionals that much harder. More remedial training. More training that teaches meta-cognitive thinking skills. Dealing more with splinter groups and labor unrest, as we further divide into the haves and have-nots. Dealing more with globalization as professional and managerial jobs are shipped off-shore. Dealing ...

Stephen Downes has once again come out with complaints about how the Edublog Awards are being handled this year. It makes me wonder, do "You Like Awards?" OK, so the edublog awards nominations are out. I honestly don't know what they were thinking this time around - there's something like twenty or so nominees in some categories (and I'm not sure what to make of the result that this website is not among the twenty or so considered for best individual weblog - it's not sour grapes, I'm just bemused). Also, there has been confusion about the rules; people have been posting their ...

Tony Karrer's Big Question for the month of December is, ‘What did you learn about learning in 2008?' This has certainly been a year of learning for me. I was involved in several projects, not all of them employment related. But they were all to do with teaching and learning. The long and the short of it all is, that I've learnt so much about learning this year; I can't possibly cover it all in one post. So I've prioritised my list down to one item. Bookshops as big as supermarkets: Fifteen years ago, I listened to a soliloquy from a work colleague, at a meeting on learning ...

Online Educa 2008 Keynote, December 4, 2008 Harold Elletson 2064 registered delegates from 91 countries Sweden 76 Finland 79 Spain 88 Poland 90 Norway 149 Netherlands 237 UK 247 German 291 Optimism is here, a small bright light in a world dark with the credit crunch and Mumbai terrorism. Joseph Pierre Ndiaye , Sengal. Senegal is host country for eLearning Africa this year. Permanent secretary to the minister of education. Il parle en Français. Il lit son papier. Alors, pas de spontanéité. How can a wi-fi net be soooooo slow? It takes me five ...

Speaking of alumni (see yesterday's post ) This month ASTD's magazine T&D featured one of Bloomsburg University's Instructional Technology alumni, Rachel in their article FUTURE LEADERS 2020. The article is about up and comming folks and what they are doing in the field of learning and e-learning. Here is what the magazine said about Rachel: Rachel Troychock is technology based learning manager at KPMG. Currently, she is leading an initiative to incorporate the use of Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs and wikis into learning. Previously, she was an instructional designer responsible ...

Here's another new site I was emailed about; this time from Michelle. Search the entire Internet or select a specific topic for a tailored search experience. Want to find out more? Watch this video. Spific

Jane's E-Learning Pick of the Day appears in the final nominations list for the Best Resource Sharing Edublog 2008 category. Thanks to all those who nominated it to get its place there, and thanks to all of you, of course, if you vote for it!! The full list of nominations in all the categories is available at the Edublogs Award . Congratulations to all the other nominees.

The Learning Circuit’s Blog Big Question for December is “What did you learn about learning in 2008?”  It’s good to reflect, and using the end of the calendar year is a traditional time.  Consequently, I trolled back through a year of blog posts.  Whew! I saw several recurrent threads, but the strongest one is on learning to learn.  I think we’ve seen more focus on that this year, particularly with Tony Karrer & Michelle Martin’s Work Literacy effort, and a lot of the discussion at the Corporate Learning Trends conference (most recently).

Chill Out Win a trip to the Ice Hotel in Lapland Navigation - link to other main sections from here Skip Navigation Martin Johnson faces some brutal decisions Stephen Jones News Comment Business Money Sport Life & Style Travel Driving Arts & Ents Video Archive Our Papers UK News World News Politics Environment Weather Tech & Web Video Photo Galleries Topics Mobile RSS Times Online Times Archive Google Where am ...

If you've never listened to the Science Ig Nobel Awards, you have never lived. Many techies dream of the Nobel Prize for their scientific work ... for the rest of us there is Science Ig Nobel . Link to Nation Public Radio's podcast and find out! This is one of my favorite podcasts to listen each year.

Measuring Up 2008 (.pdf) is a report on state of the American higher education system. Lessons can be gleaned for other countries, particularly with regards to costs as barriers. Tuition has increased by 439% between 1982 and 2006, far out pacing the increases other costs in society (medical care only increased an anemic (in contrast) 251% during the same time period - see p. 8 of the report). While online learning has many more advantages beyond a reduction of costs (in theory at least - costs are often as high, or even more so, in online learning versus face-to-face), figures as high as ...

Today I thought a blog field trip would be fun. What is a blog field trip? Well, if you regularly view this blog and leave a comment or just lurk (which is great as well). Today, I thought you could spend your time at "Virtical" Education and leave a comment there or lurk on that site. Like an actual field trip, visiting another blog will give you a new perspective and something to think about. New surroundings. This one is by one of our alumni and has already received a comment from another alumni. Blogs...a great way to keep in touch. I left a comment on post on the entry "Hybrid ...

One of the innovative sessions at DevLearn08 this year demonstrated how SecondLife can be used as a video production tool.  There is so much talk (i.e. Hype) about SecondLife as an immersive learning environment, that it was really cool to see how we (instructional developers) can use the same tool for creating content without ever forcing our users to enter SecondLife. SecondLife eLearning Innovator SubQuark (aka David Miller) was the presenter for that session and after receiving some comments during DemoFest he put together a demo of a talking avatar using SecondLife.  You can ...

Whether or not you're a supporter of Predident Elect Barack Obama, you've got to love the fact that he's delivering weekly addresses via YouTube. This guy gets it, and I'm certain that he's going to miss his BlackBerry. Here's his first address from November 15th: ...

I'm happy to say that thanks to several fellow bloggers, this blog - eLearning Technology - is one of the finalists for the 2008 Edublog Awards under the category Best elearning / corporate education blog . You can click the badge below to see the other finalists and to vote on your favorites ... hopefully that's me ... :) It was a bit surprising that I didn't even know a few of the fellow finalists. One of them has not posted since August? What is Britannica's blog doing there? Actually, Presentation Zen is a bit of a surprise too. Great blog. But not sure I get that as ...

Read this intriguing article in Slate. It talks about how some people can elicit an emotional response in others that enables optimism and moral inspiration. Quoted from the article: University of Virginia moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt , who coined the term elevation , writes, "Powerful moments of elevation sometimes seem to push a mental 'reset button,' wiping out feelings of cynicism and replacing them with feelings of hope, love, and optimism, and a sense of moral inspiration." I don't think most training situations would benefit from such elevation, but some might.

It's always interesting to look back at the past year - 2008, think about what has changed for me during the year, and think about what that means for the next year - 2009. My blog is really the hub of my thinking and activity, so by going back through posts for the 2008, it gives me a pretty good perspective on what's been happening inside my head during 2008. To do my review, I first looked at what I was writing about and what people were reading on my blog in 2008. Top 2008 Posts based on Read Counts: 100 eLearning Articles and White Papers Free - Web 2.0 for Learning ...

Supporting, accelerating and directing learning from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) brings together the conclusions and insights from the CIPD's Helping People Learn project'. It also brings together much of the work that Martyn Sloman has carried out as Learning, Training and Development Adviser at the CIPD as he moves on to pastures new. Now I haven't seen eye to eye with Martyn completely on the subjects of e-learning (see CIPD gives e-learning a mixed report ) or evaluation (see ROE, sorry but no thanks ), but this paper highlights that we have much more ...

Jay is a wise man using humor to spice up any workshop and at this occasion he was wearing a yellow tie and suspenders. The audience was very diverse but all with an eLearning perspective and their social media background as well. The workshop is taken a complete day, but unfortunately I had a deadline to meet in the afternoon, so what follows is only on the first part of the day (before lunch). Jay Cross had asked me to be one of the 'guides' during the workshop. A guide is someone who is into informal learning and/or using social media and willing to share information on it. I am always ...

Create a Jog (a mnemonic device or memorable phrase) to help remember your stuff. Memory experts learn this way; it's as easy as 1,2,3.. Watch the video here: ...

We interrupt your regularly scheduled blog for this important message: I was talking with one of the bright and lively people at DevLearn 08 (the conference * rocked *), and we started talking about different folks’ ’styles’. She was opining about a couple of well known consultants and their credibility. I naturally asked about her perception of mine, and she was surprised to find out I was an independent consultant, thinking I was some sort of academic. That’s not an insult, as I have been an academic and I believe that the deep background I bring to bear is ...

Whenever people are able to connect and collaborate, engage in conversations, share expertise, and access information, the impact on a society (or quality of life to individuals) can be enormous. This is obviously true for developed countries. But can the same be said about developing countries? Does giving internet access to a poor farmer in South America, Africa, or in poorer regions of Canada, US, or Europe, benefit? Don’t people need the basics of life first? Yes. And no. Web 2.0 in Africa (via Elearning Africa blog) suggests web 2.0 tools can assist farmers in regions such as ...

It is the 5th year of the Edublog Awards, an awards program for bloggers who use blogs and social media to support education (so it’s a practitioner focus). The program is managed by Josie Fraser and founded by James Farmer. while the focus on the “Eddies,” as they are called, is the K-12 and higher ed sector, there is a category for “Best elearning/corporate education blog.” I make a point to read blogs that do not focus on elearning and corporate education exclusively because many are just good reading and contain a great deal of information that is easily ...

Mark Bullen writes an important blog - netgen nonsense - that I encourage educators to follow. He takes a critical look at evidence (or lack of it) that supports the concept of net generation learners. His blog title is obviously intended to be controversial, but his views are well considered. His main message: evidence to date does not support broad assumptions about different traits/characteristics of learners who have been raised in a technologically rich environment. From a recent post (he is quoting a research report from UK): “The findings show that many young students are ...