Tony Karrer

MARCH 27, 2007

I've been involved with several different groups of people who are having different kinds of discussions that happen among bloggers. The most common models of blog discussions seem to have turned into a few patterns: Organic Blog Discussions - someone posts something interesting, lots of bloggers post on the topic, distributed discussion ensues. Blog Tag Memes - Someone posts a question and "Tags" five people to give their response.

Discussion 100

Discussion Blogging Diversity Training Tagging 100

Tony Karrer

MARCH 27, 2007

Someone posted a comment in my previous post on Course Authoring and Rapid eLearning Tool Satisfaction asking whether I had used RapideL. The answer is that I've only seen it demoed. But when I looked back at my post, I realized that I had cut off quite a few authoring tools because I had only included reports where the number of evaluations was 15 or more.

KnowledgePlanet 100

KnowledgePlanet RapideL eLearning Tools Elicitus 100

Tony Karrer

MARCH 26, 2007

I just posted on Disruptive Changes in Learning and then I run into: InfoWorld folds print mag to focus on online and events. It makes you wonder if this isn't indicative of the shift. In fact, you have to wonder if the model that Steve Fox is heading towards where he maintains a paid content writing/publishing staff isn't going to still have major problems.

Problem 100

Problem Free Content Change 100

Tony Karrer

MARCH 23, 2007

Tony O'Driscoll - who will be on a panel at the eLearningGuild conference in Boston coming up in a few weeks and will be talking about this very topic - has published a paper in eLearn and created an interesting blog post with video (embedded below) that starts with a question many of us are asking: Are virtual worlds a breakthrough technology that will forever reshape learning and business?

Second Life 100

Second Life Virtual Classroom eLearningGuild Virtual World 100

Tony Karrer

MARCH 22, 2007

Dave Lee just posted on LCB - I'm a little verklempt! - where he points out that this month's big question - March Big Question: Supporting New Managers? - didn't get as many posts as in the past few months. He wonders what's the cause. A couple of the responses got me fired up. Harold Jarche tells us. Yes, I'm busy but more importantly, the question was not of interest.

Informal Learning 100

Informal Learning Informal Management Big Question 100

Tony Karrer

MARCH 20, 2007

Saw CBT/WBT - who likes it ? where the author states: In Europe and USA many of our on-line students seem to take courses outside work hours. But they do it in short bursts of activity. In Asia (and particularly Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia) we note that students do much longer periods of study in one session, but mostly during work hours. The same is true in Africa.

Pattern 100

Pattern eLearning Press Study 100

Tony Karrer

MARCH 20, 2007

I just saw that several of the Brandon Hall researchers have started blogs: Tom Werner - example post - Why Learning Professionals Shouldn't Just Focus on Learning Tim Sosbe - example post - Pop Quiz: What Do Learning Leaders Care About? Janet Clarey - example post - Why blended learning is not BS Gary Woodill First, let me say that I applaud this move, but it's a bit of a curious development to me.

Brandon Hall 100

Brandon Hall Research Blogging eLearningGuild 100

Tony Karrer

MARCH 20, 2007

In my last post: Brandon Hall Researchers Blogging - Implications? - I missed Richard Nantel - example post: Information Overload By the way, he's the CEO of Brandon Hall research, and he does a brief explanation of what he'll cover in: The focus of this Blog , but it doesn't necessarily answer how they will differentiate paid and unpaid information.

Brandon Hall 100

Brandon Hall Information Overload Research Blogging 100

Tony Karrer

MARCH 14, 2007

As I'm thinking about going to the eLearningGuild Annual Gathering in Boston next month and ASTD in Atlanta in June, I went back to look at some notes I had created before around getting ready for conferences. Be an Insanely Great Professional Conference Attendee And the net of it was that you really needed to be prepared with good questions, which I had talked about in: Better Questions for Learning Professionals Then, I realized that the LCB Big Question from February would be a good thing to

Conference 100

Conference eLearningGuild ASTD Big Question 100

Tony Karrer

MARCH 15, 2007

Just saw this : Earlier this month, Microsoft announced it was finally adding voice capabilities to its Live Communication Server. And now Cisco is adding hosted collaboration to compete with Microsoft's hosted service known as Live Meeting. This makes me wonder what these systems will start to look like in a couple of years and whether folks like Elluminate will be able to compete.

WebEx 100

WebEx Elluminate Microsoft Server 100

Tony Karrer

MARCH 13, 2007

(via Stephen Downes ) Impact of Open Source Software on Education, Series Launch is interesting both because of the publishing model and because of the content. The publishing model is something we might want to consider at LCB. What they've done is recruit authors who are going to publish (via a blog) something between a blog post, interview and an article every other week on a particular topic - in this case Open Source.

Open Source 100

Open Source Open Wiki Write Blog 100

Tony Karrer

MARCH 12, 2007

Ray Sims has been doing great stuff over on his blog: Sims Learning Connections. I've just read his answer to this month's big question - What Would You Do to Support New Managers? - Supporting New Managers With Informal Learning - good stuff. Worth taking a look at. While I'm on it - one of the most important aspects of helping managers transition is to effectively support and coach them over time.

Performance Support 100

Performance Support Support Management Big Question 100

Tony Karrer

MARCH 12, 2007

Saw a post by Justyn Howard Who took the 'consult' out of 'consulting'? where he says that: I've witnessed more than one example of e-Learning and LMS consultants who are hired by an organization to help select a vendor and create a deployment strategy. These practitioners then simply present 3-4 solutions that they have "referral" relationships with, see which one sticks and collect a check (from the client and the vendor).

vendor 100

vendor Consulting LMS Strategy 100

Tony Karrer

MARCH 7, 2007

Amazingly, I only recently found out that in transitioning from the old to new Blogger versions, Google was nice enough to add something to my blog: meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW" This tells the search engine spiders to ignore your page. So, no search engine traffic and Google's blog search didn't work for me. And it isn't just me. It appears that lots of blogs have this.

Blogging 100

Blogging Engineering Search Google 100

Tony Karrer

MARCH 8, 2007

A couple of comments came in on my post Important Notice to Blogger Blog Owners that made me realize I hadn't included a full description of what I ended up doing. As a reminder the problem is that Blogger had inserted: <meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW"$gt This tells the Google spider not to index this page. To get rid of it, you can remove: However, this also removes a few other lines from your file that includes your autodiscovery of RSS feeds.

Tagging 100

Tagging Issue RSS Templates 100

Tony Karrer

MARCH 5, 2007

A recent spate of posts on the challenges of running an open source business is interesting ( Tosh , Siemens , Downes , Tosh 2 , ). Dave Tosh laments - Elgg is the most popular white label social networking platform in the world powering over 2000 networks. However, Elgg could power 100,000 networks and it would make no difference - there is no revenue stream as we give everything away under a GPL license.

Open Source 100

Open Source Open Social Networks White Label 100

Tony Karrer

MARCH 5, 2007

Ray Sims has been doing great stuff on his blog. He does a great job of breaking down topics into smaller pieces. A recent example - Content Search: Use Cases - which explores some of the different ways we search for things and helps us think about when Google might be a good answer and when it's likely not.

Search 100

Search Content Google Job 100

Tony Karrer

MARCH 29, 2007

I received some great questions from Christy Tucker in reference to my recent post Types of Blog Discussions I have started using CoComment based on your mention of it a while back. I admit that I really wasn't doing much commenting prior to that because I never remembered to go back and look. Having the comment threads in Google Reader with everything else makes it much easier for me to keep track of.

Discussion 100

Discussion Track Community Blogging 100

Tony Karrer

MARCH 5, 2007

Over the weekend, I heard from Dave Lee that the Learning Circuits Blog - home of the monthly big question - had been labelled a spam blog. Here is Dave's note taken for the side bar: I'm writing to you through the sidebar because Google has frozen LCB because they believe it is a spam blog. What's a spam blog? Here's Google's definition: As with many powerful tools, blogging services can be both used and abused.

Blogging 100

Blogging Big Question Write Blog Google 100

Tony Karrer

MARCH 16, 2007

Just yesterday, I posted about Conference Preparation and I'm preparing for a couple of conferences so I definitely looked back at: Be an Insanely Great Professional Conference Attendee. One of the questions I often ask attendees - especially as we are discussing virtual classroom tools and virtual environments (e.g., Second Life) - is: Why did we come to this conference?

Conference 100

Conference Virtual Classroom Social Networks eLearningGuild 100