Oh, the things that buzz around in our heads and need to get out into the world to get some fresh air, new insights and those sparks that make it all magic. Welcome to the intersection of two of the most powerful techniques for creative, open thinking. Maybe you’ll say, "Megan’s a recovering consultant with an MBA. OF COURSE everything boils down to a pithy 2×2 matrix." And you are probably quite right on that. And maybe you’ll say, "Oh now this sounds like fun." And, again, you are probably quite right. Then you’ll ponder a bit and say, "Wait just a minute … there’s no substance here!" Stay tuned.

Reddit's recent controversy is mired in a push to decentralize, and at the heart of that is a technology called Blockchain. The post This Man Says He Can Save Reddit With the Spirit of Bitcoin appeared first on WIRED.

Aggregage, the platform that powers eLearning Learning has added a powerful personalization engine.  That means that eLearning Learning now allows users to sign-up and have their content personalized based on their interests. You can sign-up via the "Personalize Your Content" button on the right side of the interface shown to the right of the red arrow below.  Or put another way, just above and right of the picture of Justin Bieber.  By the way, I should point out that the four top articles on the site when I took the screen shot were all great: 5 E-Learning Forecasts for 2012 The Flipped Learning Revolution — Coming to a Brain Near You? Failing to Learn Creating an online learning personality It's what I love about the site.  It always has great, fresh content from a wide variety of industry professionals.  Every time I visit it, I find something that I missed that was really good content. Now with personalization it's even better. The picture below gives a sense of what's happening: Curators handle finding the best sources of content.  The system then uses social signals such as those coming from Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, delicious as well as clicks and views.  These are compared to averages for the source and also looks at who is providing the signal, how often they signal things, how often they signal for that particular source, etc.  Those aspects existed before and it does a good job of finding great content.  You can read a bit more about these aspects in eLearning Learning Launches New Features. What's new now is that the site allows you to sign up and provide your Twitter and LinkedIn information.   The site will look at your activity on these sites and the content of what you share.  It will use that to find interests as well as to cluster you with other users who are like you based on interests and sharing.  You can partially control your interests via the Subscription page as shown below: This will change over time based on your LinkedIn and twitter activity.  You can always visit and manually select interests as well.  You can read a bit more here: Personalization Explained. The system then can combine three pieces of information to figure out what will be most interesting to you: Social signal score - are people in the audience finding it interesting Topic match - does it match up with your interests Like sharing - are individuals who are like you sharing this The system uses these to both rank things on the site and to generate Daily and Weekly newsletters. The reason that I'm most exited about this is that I partly use eLearning Learning to make sure I don't miss things that is good content that is relevant to me.  Now with personalization, it is even less likely that something will sneak by.  I also personally like the format of the new newsletter. Give it a try and let me know what you think. eLearning Technology Subscribe to the Best of eLearning Learning for updates from this blog and other eLearning blogs.

Are you planning to be at the mLearnCon, June 10-12 in Austin, TX? Catch up with Megan! Here’s a complete schedule of her events. Hope to see you there!   Wednesday, June 10 Morning Buzz (MB04) - Agile Project Management 7:30 AM - 8:15 AM | Schedule 210 - LRSs: What You Need to Know Now 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM | Session Description   Thursday, June 11 508 - News Flash: Adopting Agile Requires a Culture Change. Are You Ready For It? 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM | Session Description 603 - Using the xAPI and RFID to Create Personalized Interactive Learning 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM | Session Description   Friday, June 12 1006 - Agile Project Management for eLearning Development 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM | Session Description Quick Guide to LLAMA: Agile Project Management for Learning Bookstore | Book | TD at Work

Back in 2007, I provided a long list of sources of stock photography for eLearning. And there are lots of other posts available on eLearning Learning Stock Photography.  But I really missed something important: traditional stock photo sources are often a pain for eLearning. I had coffee with Bryan Jones, the founder of eLearningArt,last week in Los Angeles, and it led to a discussion about images/stock photography and eLearning.  At the start of the conversation, I wasn't quite sure why a company would focus on stock photography specifically aimed at eLearning.  But Bryan was really good at pointing out the pain that goes with getting stock photography from traditional sources and trying to use it for eLearning. The best way to illustrate the point is with an example. Let’s say I’m creating some eLearning to teach people sales skills. I want to create scenarios where I use characters to walk through common issues that come up when a sales rep meets with customers. For that I need: 1 character to represent my sales rep 2 characters to represent different customers Multiple poses of the sales rep and characters interacting with each other If I go to a traditional stock photography site and search for business characters, I’ll find: Lots of characters in a suit and tie, but not many in business casual, like my sales reps and customers wear A single, finished shot, but not multiple shots of the characters together in the poses I need Isolated characters only face the camera, so they’re not good to use in an interactive scene People that look more like models than my customers Millions of images to sort through, but very few that are relevant to me Bryan explained that the issues above are why he created eLearningArt. He highlights that, as an eLearning developer, you would ideally have: Characters shot in isolation, with the backgrounds removed, and in many poses. You can then build your own scene by inserting the character s in the poses you want onto any background. "Real" looking characters of various ages and ethnicities that look like people you work with Characters facing both forward for use in reaction shots, avatars, etc., as well as facing away from the camera to be used in scenarios and conversations Photos organized by outfits and characters. For example, if I want an Asian male doctor, I can look under medical images, find the character I want, and know that there will be dozens of images in that pack. This greatly reduces image search time. Access to other files, such as background images, other stock photos, and templates all formatted for eLearning   That’s not to say that traditional stock sites have no value. There are plenty of images on these sites that are useful. However, the needs of the eLearning developer are often unique, and a site that focuses on eLearning stock photography now makes a lot of sense to me. Bryan's not the only one doing eLearning related stock photography.  Here's a bit more information on a few of these types of sites:   One Time Purchase Price (average per image) Subscription Price (Annual per user) Unlimited downloads Characters by industry Other products eLearningArt About $1 per $240 Yes Business casual, casual, suits, on the phone, medical, industrial, casual Templates, stock photos, background images eLearningStock $1-$5 based on size Not sure on this No (credit system) Professional, business, phone, medical Animated characters, templates eLearningTemplates About $2 per $2,500 Yes Business, casual, industrial, medical Games, activities, skins, templates, interactions, stock photos eLearning Technology Subscribe to the Best of eLearning Learning for updates from this blog and other eLearning blogs.

In the latest 'Geek's Guide to the Galaxy' podcast author Ernie Cline talks about what would actually happen in an alien invasion. The post Sci-Fi Has Been Prepping Us for an Alien Invasion for Years appeared first on WIRED.

According to ComScore, we are spending more and more time glued to a screen reading and collaborating on the Internet. No matter what country you live in, the digital golf cart has long left the clubhouse and it is gaining speed on the high-speed golf greens en route toward 100 percent pervasive participation. What’s missing? Dare I say a caddy? Personally, I’d like to see far more senior executives and leaders gripping the social media (and by extension the social learning) 3-wood and driving participation balls as far as they can. Enough of the putt-putt mini-golf shenanigans; just grip it and rip it. By virtue of becoming more participative and thus collaborative with their internal and external social media presence, I reckon senior executives and leaders will begin to demonstrate "sideways leadership" in their organizations. Sideways leadership is like it sounds - leading horizontally and not just vertically. Social media cuts through hierarchy, or as Chairman Harold Jarche of Internet Time Alliance suggests, "hyperlinks subvert hierarchy, and networks subvert standardization." To be an effective senior leader in any organization going forward, those who hold positions of high authority should begin to lead sideways and join the conversation as peers of the organization. Rest assured, everyone else in the organization not in positions of power will continue to respect your title, your experience and your authority. You need not worry about your amplitude; the mere fact you are participating in social media and thereby demonstrating sideways leadership will spread at the speed of a tee shot. Think about children who just found out there are free cookies at the back table of a second grade function. That’s how fast news will spread that you’re now a "sideways social media leader." At the Yammer corporate blog, author Maria Ogneva has found there to be significant benefits of social networks and social media within the organization, specifically as it relates to CEO priorities. McKinsey believes social media technologies are already in fact extending the organization. But we’re not quite yet at the tee box, ready to yell "fore." In Too Big To Know, author David Weinberger states: "Whether or not the Web tends to make us more insular, we know that human beings have a tendency toward homophily; we prefer to be with people who are like us. All the participants in this debate agree that excessive homophily is a bad thing." By extending this argument to senior leaders, I professionally argue that the reason we don’t yet see the internal or external social media participation uptake we yearn for is due to (at least in part) the natural crowd that has formed with senior leaders. They have to unlearn what they’ve learned. As they spend most of their time with other senior leaders, who is going to break the homophilic cycle that prevents social media from crossing the chasm of increasing senior leadership sideways participation levels? Fast Company posits people and culture are the biggest barriers to digital transformation inclusive to the use of social media. Not surprisingly, if we don’t have senior leaders practicing sideways leadership through social media, that barrier is going to remain. Heck, we still have 44 percent of organizations blocking the actual use of social media at work. In summary, we know that people (define as you will) are using the Internet more. I’ve got a hunch this isn’t going to suddenly nose dive or erratically stop. Employee habits, therefore, are changing. Not only are they using the Internet more, it is becoming a natural extension to the way in which business is conducted, how learning and communication occurs and how performance is achieved. It’s time to introduce sideways leadership into the golf bag of all senior leaders. Originally posted to CLO Blog. Reprinted with permission. 63 total views, no views today Related Posts:The 20% Leadership ChallengeWhere Does Leadership of Social Media Lie?Friday Fun: Get Back to WorkSocial Media is not Social LearningFriday Fun: Meet Gump Shun

I'm really excited today.  We get to finally announce that eLearning Learning has partnered with Training Magazine Network.   These two industry leaders in online learning and training bring together their extensive content and community offerings to form the largest eLearning offering on the Web. When you visit the eLearning Learning site, you probably won't notice that much different.  You see a new logo.  But the important thing is that there's still great content on the site every day - oh hey, Karl Kapp just wrote about Gamification - hold on, let me check that out.  And if you are like me, you can't visit the site all the time, so you should sign up for a Personalized Newsletter on the right. The bigger change is described by Ray Jimenez, CEO of Training Magazine Network, a fellow blogger and likely someone many of you know.  He tells us: Online learning and training is a dynamic and growing industry. It’s not easy for our industry professionals to stay current on all of the important analysis, information and how-to pieces available. A critical element of our value is providing the kind of in-depth thinking and research that is brought together in eLearingLearning’s site and newsletter. Our members need this kind of information to stay at the top of their game, and eLearningLearning.com is the best place for them to do just that. Ray is now putting eLearning Learning content front and center on their site and in newsletters.  You can see it in action below.  There's Karl's post. Looking forward to more great things for eLearning Learning. eLearning Technology Subscribe to the Best of eLearning Learning for updates from this blog and other eLearning blogs.

Space Photos of the Week, July 5 - 11. The post Space Photos of the Week: Venus Gets All Up in the Sun’s Business appeared first on WIRED.

I’m amazed to see how far collaboration has come in the organization. It amazes me even more how much further it has to go. I recall a conversation I once had in a public gym which went something like this. "Hey Dan, how is that ‘collaboration’ thing going?" "Pretty well, I think." "Well, I believe it’s overhead, so I’ve asked my team to get back to work. We’re not ‘collaborating’ going forward." Maybe Edwin Land was right … "Politeness is the poison of collaboration."