e-Clippings (Learning As Art)

Mailana's Awesome Visual Twitter Explorer

This is so cool. Check out my network via Mailana.
So you can put in your Twitter handle, your location or a search term like say "e-learning" and you get this awesome visual map back.

Now according to this page, this network is using something like 210 million messages from almost 400,000 people. So what's cool about all this? Well, I'm still playing around with this but I find it very interesting that when you search on a term like "e-learning" - you get a map of the active conversations on Twitter on that topic. So you get to see who is talking to who, who is most active and you can even turn and go into those conversations. That's just tremendous. What's also tremendous is that this is just a demo of what Mailana is actually supposed to do. Evidently this tool was designed to extract meaning from corporate email systems. Now I want to get it installed at work!

So now we get to the arrogant portion of the post - the part where I offer suggestions to someone as smart as Pete Warden about how to make this tool better - I want this as an AIR app...I want to see a drop down menu feature like the little gem in TweetDeck, I want that menu to allow me to follow people - maybe see their most recent tweets and so on...I want the "info" link to pop up the conversation in a side panel...

Seriously, Mr. Warden, you've got like a mild form of attention-heroin here, with a little tweaking - it could become insanely addictive.

"March 4, 2009: CNBC Gives Financial Advice" (Daily Show)

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

CNBC Gives Financial Advice

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

e-Learning Guild Annual Gathering 2009 Coverage

Um....did you say you had a negative assessment of my last session?

  (The Hero Factory)

Looking for ways to advertise U.S. government jobs teaching contracting

 So, the Chief of Staff at my little Defense Acquisition University came into my office late last week. This got my attention. He told me that he was aware that there were going to be some hiring needed to fill some new slots in our acquisition teaching corps.

Then he said that he wanted to explore some of the more "2.0" ways that we could look for people to fill these slots. Part of reasoning is that these slots are kinda mid-career slots so the people looking at them might be early 30's maybe not long in terms of federal service or so on and they might be better tuned to those channels. I think he also just wants to try this stuff out that I've been talking about and see if it can actually do anything.

Immediately, I put this call out to Twitter to see what I was missing or what ideas we could come up with. Here is what I got:
1. Twitter the jobs. Duh but thanks.
2. LinkedIn. Good. That one could actually be productive.
3. Listservs (Web Managers Listserv,) was the only one I could find - so if you have others and know the URL, lemme know
4. Acquisition Community Connection: another easy one...

So the meeting is tomorrow morning to review how we will do this...any last minute suggestions? Sen ;em in!

Thx @govloop, @coelacanthro @adrielhampton @Quinnovator ...for the suggestions....

"Why Boys Need Alternatives with Reading and Writing" (Eide Neurolearning Blog)

(link)

This is a really interesting article about differences in the ways that young boys and girls learn and process language.

"Some careful consideration needs to made of instructional implications for boys given some of these new discoveries. Learning by listening and learning by reading are not synonymous; route-congruent factors(listening - oral presentation, reading - written response) may need to be considered when a learning gap or frank underachievement is seen, and an insistence on the availability of auditory-visual supports (reading along with books-on-tape, detailed handouts for lecture courses) should be a requirement of every classroom."

Take a read for yourself - I need to dig deeper into some to the other resources mentioned in the piece - but am I alone or does this give anyone else pause about how we think about instructional design? Does anyone else wonder what else we may be missing? Anyone? Anyone?

"Appcelerator Updates Open Source Alternative To Adobe Air" (Information Week)

(story link)

"Open source software vendor Appcelerator has delivered the second preview release (PR2) of its rich Internet application platform for developers, called Titanium. As a way to help groups of developers collaborate more efficiently, the company has also thrown into PR2 Titanium Developer, social media and communications tools such as Twitter, FriendFeed, and a chat capability."

So I didn't check while I was in Vegas on what the odds were on something that goes against AIR has but what do you all think? I know that its gonna be hard enough for me to get AIR past my IT people and it comes from Adobe. 

Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (Dusan Writer's)

I just bought this book and have started working through it - and the purchase was largely based on this interview.

"Boellstorff makes the case that the counterpoint to virtual worlds is not the real world, but the actual. And that this virtuality includes two important things: it is virtual (of course, but he explores this with incredible insight and finesse) meaning that you are never QUITE there, and that this is incredibly important; and two, it is grounded in craft, in techne, and that virtual worlds may be a harbinger of a shift from a knowledge or information culture, into a craft-based one….or perhaps a mash-up of the two, what’s now coming to be known as “crafty knowledge”."

I'm also happy to note that I said I was "working through this book" and just reading it. I like reading carefully researched work with footnotes, endnotes, bibliographies...I love work that pushes me down other avenues and I look forward to getting thru this book.

**I should also include the link to Dusan Writer's Top 5 Virtual World Books.

"Six ways to make Web 2.0 work" (McKinsey Quarterly)

So I am actually generally impressed by the McKinsey Quarterly and particularly their Web site. I noticed them integrating feeds, widgets and now Twitter responses to their articles from early on.

The other thing that is nice about McK Q is that it is one of those publications that goes over well with the folks upstairs. MCKQ focuses on corporate issues and they have a certain cachet when I can walk into the boss and say "see. I told you this would be important." HBR works too. I also love the fact that they footnote their stories.

In this article, they lay out what they consider to be "six critical factors that determine the outcome of efforts to implement these technologies." They are:

1. The transformation to a bottom-up culture needs help from the top.
2. The best uses come from users—but they require help to scale.
3. What’s in the workflow is what gets used.
4. Appeal to the participants’ egos and needs—not just their wallets.
5. The right solution comes from the right participants.
6. Balance the top-down and self-management of risk.

From my experience, that's a pretty spot-on list.  #3 is especially important...particularly say if you happen to work in an organization whose age demographic skews older and need strong ties between what you are proposing and what they are already doing. I have this image in my head of leading a group of people thru a fog bank along a mountain path and they are help together by a thin line - that line connects all the crazy stuff I'm talking about to their reality - break the line and you lose their support.

A.nnotate - Love the functionality but REALLY love the thought out into pricing

I am all in favor of products that fit into existing workflow and have potential to make that workflow easier and/or faster. At first blush, A.nnotate seems to fall into that category.

So the functionality is one that allows you to add comments, notes, etc to online documents - nice but I also like the thought they put into handing the notes. It appears that when you add a note, it goes into a private, searchable note index.

All that is nice right but as I am reading their site, I'm thinking to myself, this is good but it will never fly with my organization. Really? You want us to load docs to your server AND load notes to your server as well? Not going to happen. THEN I got a great surprise when I clicked over to A.nnotate's "pricing" page and saw that one of their solutions is a "standalone" option with the service on an appliance that can be installed behind my firewall. Now I haven't even tried the free version of A.nnotate but I just want to say that it is refreshing to see a company that offers this right up front and not only that, they publish PRICES! Holy Cow A.NNOTATE, are you looking to turn things upside down?

Here si the only problem with the pricing. The most expensive option only comes to about $10K for the first year and then $2K per year in maintenance after that. How am I ever going to be able to convince people that its worthwhile when it costs so little? :-)