Ricky: We’ve got to use our brains. Lucy: Well, let’s see .. Ricky: You stay out of this. Seriously, it’s no wonder my feed reader is overwhelming right now. Over time, I’ve messed this up pretty good. Look at these categories and you’ll see how I ended up with duplicates in various folders. And "other"? Please…it’s about as lazy as the attempted new Gap logo. Here’s what I’ve got: Academic (Brainiacs) Business (People who write about *you guessed it* business. Super fun!) Corporate E-learning  (This one’s in pretty good shape.) EdTech (I mean who even says that outside of educational technology departments?) Games (Very few here…I’d like them all this simple.) Humor (Essential reading from messed up individuals) K-12 (For my children.) Other E-learning (See what I mean? Lazy. Some of these aren’t even "e.") Other Tech (Not to be confused with the folder "Tech" which does not exist or "EdTech" which shouldn’t.) Society (This is depressing reading.) Virtual Worlds (Mostly newer 3D stuff…not Second Life…which you probably thought of first.) Garden (I like looking at successful gardens.) Google (I think they - Google - made this folder themselves…because I sure the hell don’t remember making it.) Journalism (Just some good writing about writing and media.) Recommended by Others (This was supposed to be my quarantine area…i.e., I know *you* want to read but do I?) Social Web (This is a bunch of social media mavens.) and, below all those folders, a boatload of subscriptions not yet classified. Would you start over? How do you categorize your reading? How many subscriptions do you manage?

It all started with an email in February with the subject line: "Your future role." I know, right? Foreboding. Oddly (viewed now) I had just written a post called 2010: The Year of Kicking Ass. When I wrote about challenges, plans, and predictions back at the beginning of the year, I would not have thought my employment status would change so drastically just two months later. I was jobless. A paycheck every other week vanished. Suddenly, I was an independent contractor whether I wanted to  be one or not. I had to regroup and rethink everything. I reached out to my network. Many opportunities surfaced which I was grateful for. Many virtual shoulders appeared.  (Friends without quotation marks.) I went through a period of trying to figure out what to do. I went on some interviews. I did some freelance stuff. I felt unsettled. I tried not to worry my parents or kids and wondered if I would be able to afford things like hockey for my son. Would the kids be able to go to their summer camps? We canceled our annual summer vacation at the lake. A tradition of ten years. A dual-income household had become a single-income household. Of course, I wasn’t alone. Many people found themselves without a regular day job after the economy tanked. Many - including me - were ‘underemployed’  because, you know, it takes a while to get up and running. (It actually feels OK to finally write that.) Within six months I had settled into a better situation. Greener grass and all that. I walked away from the flaming bridge behind me, smoke in my eyes, and started doing challenging work again. I realized I hadn’t felt that in nearly two years. A crap economy has a way of keeping you in  "just be happy you have a job" mode. We were able to take a different kind of family vacation in August. Still, I sit here *in October* with a fair amount of anger. Still. And probably because I’ve yet to face my own faults. Oy. If you could just reach through your screen and give me a slap upside the head, it’d be appreciated. There. That’s better. Thanks. Now onward and upward.

To file under ‘haves" and "haves not"… Googlers get credits on TaskRabbit, an online service for odd jobs, as a perk. Among the odd jobs…" take shoes to the cobbler…" Cobbler? COBBLER? I guarantee you will waste five minutes browsing tasks. Much like Dobby the house elf, of Harry Potter fame, I do this type of stuff for free and have no need for cobblers and such since most of my shoes are basically plastic and therefore repairable with gorilla glue or duct tape. Via Gawker: Valleywag. (I’ll bet being a cobbler is a pretty good job right about now.)

Nick Jones writes about a supermarket mess up and says… People who produce consumer-facing technology have a responsibility to make it usable by relatively normal human beings. He suggests putting a big red button on the company’s web site that says "press me if we messed up" and includes a stream of promises that the mess up won’t happen again. Seems the same could apply to the e-learning we create if only we could figure out what a normal human being is. Relatively normal. (BTW…very nice opening line on this post…"Nightmare day. I’ve been the victim of multiple acts of malice by dumb technology, dumber processes and French unions"

Haven’t clicked all the links on this post by Olivia Mitchell but it seems like a terrific resource for people who present and train online. Note the free book on this site too "How to Present with Twitter (and other backchannels.) Thanks Olivia!

This is cool. Engagement increased by 30% across a set of web pages that were edited. Not spell check editing. EDITING damn it. Like…. "…honest-to-God, get-to-the-point, don’t-waste-my-time editing. That means establishing a focus up front, pruning verbiage, clarifying the organization, looking for meaning beneath jargon, and thinking more about the reader’s needs than the writer’s preferences. Not just for journalists but all of us who write content. Via Kathy Kehrli, a freelance writer.

Two things I got very excited about last week. The first, Saba Live (formerly Saba Social).The second, Adobe Connect 8.

I’m always cognizant of what Ellen Wagner (formerly with Adobe) said while writing about web conferencing technologies around the time Blackboard bought Wimba and Elluminate and combined them to create Blackboard Collaborate (for edu-types, I’ll insert the ‘muwhahahaha’ just for you). Ellen said, "let’s be very clear. Adobe in not an elearning company. It is a software company." This might be why you’re likely to see more reviews of Adobe Connect 8 for web conferencing/meetings than for its use as a virtual classroom. While Adobe is one of the largest software companies in the world and, while they do have a large share of the virtual classroom market, it is my experience that they’re not the first response you’ll hear when asking corporate L&D folks which virtual classroom they use. I think Cisco/WebEx has that honor. (I’ve always thought of WebEx as a borderline verb in the corporate sector, i.e. "doing a webex" or "let’s do a webex.") My point is, Adobe Connect 8 should be seen as a powerhouse virtual classroom. Adobe, of course, is no stranger to corporate e-learning. If you’re creating online learning I am willing to bet you own Captivate or perhaps Presenter and use them to create solutions we know as "rapid e-learning." Among corporations, the virtual classroom market is huge both in adoption and size. Research from Bersin & Associates indicates virtual classrooms are the most widely adopted learning technology in corporations (use increased from 45% in 2008 to 60% in 2009 Bersin notes). The giant umbrella that covers the market is huge. Frost & Sullivan forecasts the "web collaboration" (web conferencing services and software, web events, remote support) will reach $4.5 billion by 2014. And that number probably doesn’t include all uses (like the VC). Not chump change. I attended a demo with a colleague on October 26. The video conferencing integration blew me away. The interface was ‘just right, just enough’ and I didn’t feel the 5 seconds of panic I normally feel when one hands the presenter controls to you. My colleague said, ‘this seems light years ahead…’ and I couldn’t agree more. I believe it will further cut into the amount of training hours we do in the face-to-face physical classroom. When we used video conferencing to join a room in India, I was just thinking wow, no more crowding around the old TV on a cart in the conference room. I need to play with it myself (vs demo) before writing up a proper review (if you want to try it, here’s the link to a free trial). Meantime, here’s a edu review from Christopher Dawson, ZDNet, Adobe Connect 8 s the cure for wall-o’-laptop woes and distance ed and one from the Journal (also edu-focused), Adobe Connect 8 Improves Accessibility, Expands Collaborative Tools. Also interesting to note…Vidyo has a "personal telepresence" plug-in using Adobe Connect 8 Collaboration Builder SDK. Yowsa! Adobe is in the software business. We’re in the training business. We should all be happy about that. (The screen prints below are the standard ones Adobe sent at release.) Interface designCollaboration SDKVideo conferencing integrationMobile app (I receive nothing for writing this post)

Here are slides from a  presentation I did for the Australian Institute for Training and Development (AITD) a few weeks ago on facilitation and the social web. I have several people to thank for making their work available whether publicly and/or under creative commons licenses. First, Nancy White, Full Circle Associates and co-author of Digital Habitats, a thought leader in the area of community, technology, learning, and facilitation who blogs at Full Circle. Theorist George Siemens, with the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute at Athabasca University. who wrote a post "Teaching in Social and Technological Networks." Stephen Downes, National Research Council of Canada, who wrote his presentation notes for a 2007 event, Groups Vs Networks: The Class Struggle Continues." Ted Kahn, DesignWorlds and fellow of The George Lucas Educational Foundation, who wrote A New Model of Education: Designing Virtual Communities for Creativity and Learning where he lists seven new basic skills for creating effective communities. Here are the slides. I can’t stress enough is that in order to be a good facilitator, you need to be an active member of your online communities whether a public network or a private network. I feel to be successful, you need to be embedded in the community and have a high vested interest. View more presentations from Janet Clarey.

I live in an area of New York where the road signs for icy bridges are left up year round; it is not unusual to see snow anytime between October 15 and April 30 (which, coincidentally, corresponds with dates you are permitted to have studded snow tires on your vehicle). Just for that one sentence, I have located an appropriate photo from iStock photo, have looked up the proper use of a semi-colon (according to Matthew Inman), and have looked up (without intending to)  New York state snow tire laws (from Bridgestone)  by (first) searching "October 1 - April 15″, the date range that originally came to mind when I woke up to snow this morning after having snow tires put on my car just yesterday. The reason those dates came to mind is because a friend posted this status update on Facebook: Syracuse tomorrow… which led to a string of things about Syracuse, land of icy bridges. After writing that first paragraph, I answered a quick email then re-read it and wondered about the proper use of parenthesis (which I misspelled - along with the word "misspelled"). So what did I need to know to do that? What requisite skills were needed? How to open a browser How to find, and responsibly use, images How to save an image to a place where I can later locate it How to write a blog post using the WordPress platform How to use a WYSIWYG editor (so I can have bold words and bullets) How to upload media How to link to sources How to use the Web for spelling and grammar How to search and how to search to get even better results (i.e., quotation marks) And a bunch of other stuff that is so second nature I can’t even distinguish at the moment To do that I needed my: Electricity Time Warner Cable Internet service Computer WordPress installation Hosting service (because I self-host) Facebook account Browser Search engine iStock account Email account Heartbeat : ) Lest you think I’ve gone mad, I’m just reminding myself (and perhaps some of you) that this is why people’s eyes glaze over sometimes when we’re introducing new technology. As for the first sentence, it’s why my eyes glaze over this time of year but it also makes me think that we should keep the "requisite skills needed" sign up year round too…as a reminder that not everyone is used to the conditions.