We like to hear from notable people in the eLearning space, especially their views about social media and eLearning. Here we share an interview with Christopher Pappas, who combines the two fields so well. Enjoy some thoughts from ????? that’s Athens to most of us!). Christopher Pappas is the Founder and Owner of the Instructional Design and eLearning Professionals’ Group (29K+), which is the largest online community of professionals involved in the eLearning Industry at LinkedIn. Christopher holds an MBA, and an M.Ed. Ann at QL: You are really friendly, as people quickly discover. MORE >>

Many people like to share things online. Twitter is full of links to other websites. For a long time you needed to use URL shorteners to ensure you stayed within Twitter’s 140 character limit. There are now many to choose from, including  open source  and  full-service analytics. Now Twitter has its own URL shortener – t.co – that converts every link that is shared. This is so Twitter can analyze all of this sharing and then sell the aggregated information. now copy & paste the full URL into Twitter, and it auto-shortens the link. Communities Technology MORE >>

In the latest edition of Wired magazine I came across the term 'HiPPO' - the highest paid person's opinion. The term is widely used in web design and usability circles to refer to those people who have the final word on any design issue on the basis that they're the highest paid person in the room. Apparently, the evidence suggests that those dotcoms for which design decisions are made on the basis of some powerful person's opinion do much less well than those which base their decisions on data. I'm not surprised. I've worked with some pretty outrageous HiPPOS in my time, usually clients. MORE >>

During an upgrade of a few systems here at ICS, we encountered an issue with the installation of the Adobe Presenter product provided with the eLearning Suite software package. The system upgrades included Windows 7 and Microsoft Office 2010. When installing the eLearning Suite (‘eLS’) package, we noticed that Adobe Presenter was missing from the list of applications despite it being a part of the suite. Our first thought was perhaps an error with the installer, but then reviewing previous eLS installations on our Windows XP machines, we noticed Presenter had indeed been installed. MORE >>

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared  via Twitter  this past week. birgittaj – “ Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power. Benito Mussolini” HCI  : “more than 50% of line managers believe that shutting down the L&D function would have no impact on employee performance!”. Too many training departments have become mere “order takers,” responding to requests for training by harried but ill-informed managers who believe that training is the solution to every kind of performance problem. MORE >>