T+D Blog: Lifelong Learning Accounts.
What a great idea!
August 12, 2008
Learnlets » eLearning 2.0
I believe training anybody on any particular tool (even the seemingly ubiquitous Microsoft Office suite), is the wrong way to go. Talk to them about the skill (writing, creating presentations, etc), and then give some assignments across a couple of different tools. This gives you transferrable skills, which will equip you to communicate and collaborate regardless of the latest wave of tools. And that’s what’s important, in this day of increasing change.
I was just discussing this with a colleague this morning and I love Clark’s take on this.
August 12, 2008
Developing Online Training and Presentation Materials | Sun Learning eXchange
Developing Online Training and Presentation Materials | Sun Learning eXchange.
Sun has lots of “2.0-ish” information including this video site. This particular video is a nice one about PowerPoint to video using Camtasia. The rest of the site has good info and examples of wikis, blogs, etc in a corporate setting.
August 7, 2008
Facilitating Online Communities: Leigh’s Facilitation Skills
Facilitating Online Communities: Leigh’s Facilitation Skills.
I’m participating in Leigh Blackall’s Online Facilitation course and this is a post from a fellow participant that points to 10 good facilitation skills. It’s a great list to reference if you facilitate any online activities. Thanks for the link Sylvia!
August 7, 2008
What Stinks About Webinars?
Chief Learning Officer magazine – What Stinks About Webinars?.
As I read this article I found myself nodding my head. I’m much like Antonia and Colleen in the fac that I too think of webinars as “…a low-risk, easy, quick and cheap way to stay current about the state of the field…”
My personal experience has been that it’s hard to find the really good ones. I’ve seen most (if not all) of the pitfalls mentioned in the article but I don’t mind. I’ve come to see that often it’s easier to learn from non-examples (i.e. What not to do) than examples.
If you ever host / conduct online synchronous events you should go read this article to make sure you’re not making any of the mistakes mentioned.
If you do not make use of webinars as a personal learning tool you should definitely take a look at this and consider doing so. Webinars are a cheap (often free), low commitment way to learn and if it’s a bad session all you have to do it click out of it and move on.
July 29, 2008
Image quality in Articulate
http://www.articulate.com/forums/articulate-presenter/7238-quality-loss-screen-shot-images.html
If you’re having issues with the graphics being distorted after publishing, you can refer to the Word of Mouth blog below:
http://www.articulate.com/blog/optim…wser-settings/
This issue is related to how Flash handles non-vector images and small text (we don’t recommend including small text in images; you’ll see much better results if you type your text in PowerPoint).
You can learn more here: View Document.
To work around this issue you could try several things.
1) Go to Articulate -> Player Template Builder -> Other -> Browser Window Settings -> Presentation size and select “Lock presentation at optimal size.”
2) When you create your image make sure you are creating the image at the exact scale you want it to be. So if you want an image that is 340 pixels wide by 240 pixels deep then this is the size at which you should create the image. Resizing images in PowerPoint will have a direct impact on the quality of the image in your published output.
3) Try using a different file type such as emf, jpg, or png.
4) Try converting the screenshot to SWF. This will produce the best results. An inexpensive tool that can do this is Image2SWF: Vertical Moon | Convert Images to Flash
July 28, 2008
How to convert PDF to Word DOC for free: a comparative test – review & download link | freewaregenius.com
July 28, 2008
Go Big Always – Here’s my crap, please talk about it
Go Big Always – Here’s my crap, please talk about it.
I think this is right on money and I”ve also seen this happen a number of times. Garbage in..garbage out. No technology will ever fix that.
Here’ the crux of it:
We have a ton of (documents, marketing materials, assets, whatever) and we want to get that stuff out there so that other people can talk about it and make it better.
I get why this is attractive but it never ceases to amaze me. The strategy of moving the same old stuff into a community is a failing strategy. Have you ever been to a community filled with documentation and marketing materials and loved it? No. We can get that same stuff in a million other places, we don’t need another one.
Companies need to spend a lot more time thinking through why they’re doing the community to begin with. The problem is, it’s much easier to justify hanging your laundry out for other people to clean than it is to get people to think differently.
July 16, 2008
20 Useful Bookmarklets – Stepcase Lifehack
I’ve been looking for this and it’s right under my nose. I’ve been using the Windows Live Writer add-on for Firefox but since it doesn’t work with FF3 I’ve been sort of at a loss for a quick and easy way to directly post from the site I want to reference. Alas, from this article below, “Press This” does the trick. And it’s been hidden in plain site all along!
