New Direction?

I started a new job in the Digital Marketing department as a Social Media Specialist about a month ago. Obviously I haven't done much with this blog in many months, so now I'm deciding if I want to resurrect it or just let it go and focus on posting at SocialMeteor.com. Any thoughts? I have some ideas, but if you're reading this I'd be interested to hear what you have to say.

photo credit, Phillie Casablanca

President 2.0

Whether or not you're a supporter of Predident Elect Barack Obama, you've got to love the fact that he's delivering weekly addresses via YouTube. This guy gets it, and I'm certain that he's going to miss his BlackBerry.

Here's his first address from November 15th:

You know you've been busy at work when...

...you haven't updated your blog in 2 weeks!

This has been a busy place with lots of work and tight deadlines, so there just hasn't been time for any updates. I'll try to get something posted before this time next week if possible. I have a bunch of weekly drafts from the Work Literacy course that I still need to edit and post, and this week I've been trying to stay caught up with the Corporate Learning Trends & Innovations Conference (http://learntrends.ning.com and http://www.learntrends.com) by viewing the recordings at home in the evening.

I also started a Ning community in my department this week, so hopefully I'll have something to report about that soon. Right now, I'm just trying to get people to register and explore, but there seems to be some resistance. Or maybe everybody's just busy like me, and not so willing to do the fun stuff like blogging and networking at home in the evening.

eLearning Learning Site Launch

I am honored to be "featured" in Tony Karrer's re-branded eLearning Learning site. As he described it to me, this is a hub where he will pull together content from various members of the eLearning world and make it more easily accessible to people who are searching and/or who want to stay up to date, but who don't use an RSS reader (or want someone to help filter).

I have added a widget to my sidebar (scroll down to eLearning Learning Labels on the right side of the page) that automatically searches all my posts for certain keywords/tags/labels. If you click on a label in that list you will go to the eLearning Learning site where you will see all of my posts on that topic followed by posts from the other featured bloggers. For example, if you click the Wiki label in that list, it will take you here: http://www.elearninglearning.com/wiki/&source=work-2.0-blog. Check it out!

I used Tony's BrowseMyStuff site fairly frequently before this re-branding, and I found it to be an invaluable resource. Poke around when you have some time and I'm sure you'll find something you can use.

Big Question

I was very excited to find that my "Opportunity Knocks" question from 10/14/08 (see below) was the basis for The Big Question for November on Network Feedback on the Learning Circuits Blog?

Thanks for the mention, Tony! I'll be watching the replies to this month's question very closely.

Week 2 - Web 2.0 for Learning Professionals

Now that Week 3 is almost over, I should probably post my Week 2 summary! Oops!

The focus of this weeks Work Literacy - Web 2.0 for Learning Professionals course was on Social Bookmarking--Delicious and Diigo. I had already been using Delicious for a while, but upon discovering Diigo I've decided to switch. Actually, I'm still using both, but I'm focusing on using Diigo for my professional bookmarks and Delicious for all of my bookmarks, including the personal ones... I think. I'm still trying to wrap my brain around the best use of both of them. All I've done so far is bookmark (with tags) all websites/blogs/tools that I find interesting or that might be useful in my research of Web 2.0 tools for work. This should make it easier for me to find them again later.

Diigo has more of a community feel to me, but Delicious is still the more popular and "accepted" site as far as I can tell. However, Diigo does have some features that I like that aren't available on Delicious, primarily highlighting and commenting on bookmarked pages. I also like that I can set up my Diigo bookmarks to feed automatically into Delicious, so I really only have to bookmark pages once (both public and private) in Diigo and they show up on both sites.

For the class, people were tagging their bookmarks with wlning on Delicious. Check out the list here: http://delicious.com/tag/wlning.

Tagging bookmarks certainly has a use in training. For example, if I was teaching people about blogging I could create a special tag for the class such as AmFamBlogging, and any time someone found an interesting article on blogging they could bookmark it and tag it appropriately, basically sharing their knowledge with others who attended the class and who might attend the class in the future. This could also be useful for bookmarking competitor or industry information to be shared with others in the company.

Another use might be to use the "network" feature on Delicious in order to view the tags of an "expert" in a field. As an example, if you thought I was an expert on Web 2.0, you could see everything I've tagged web2.0 on Delicious here: http://delicious.com/collin.k/web2.0. Here's that same list in my Diigo account: http://www.diigo.com/user/collin_k/web2.0.

So many ideas, so little time!

The topic for Week 3 is blogs. Looks like I may be a little ahead of the curve on that one.