As I stated earlier, I saved about 35 web links during the 2nd day of the workshop, so the speed of the information being thrown at us wasn't any slower than the first day.
We had an interesting discussion about Creative Commons Licenses, which has to do with copyright for all kinds of things such as images. For example, if you look at the image I posted earlier called "Social Media Landscape", you'll notice the Creative Commons License in the lower left corner of the image, indicating "Some Rights Reserved" and an "Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike" license, meaning that anyone is free to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work as long as they attribute it to the author, don't use it for commercial purposes, and share it only under the same license. We discussed whether the eLearning Guild's use of the image in the workshop would be considered "commercial" because they are making money on the workshop. Through further exploration of the Creative Commons website, we discovered that Commercial seems to be interpreted to mean selling the image, which the Guild clearly wasn't doing. With the availability of so many images on Flickr and their use of Creative Commons Licenses, it's certainly worth learning more about this if we wish to use images found on that site and others.
At one point during the workshop, the instructors made PC to PC phone calls via Skype (blocked at AmFam) to Eric Hunter, an e-learning designer at Ebay, and Brandon Carson, the Chief Instructional Designer at Sun Microsystems. They told us a bit about what they do and allowed us to ask them questions. What was fascinating was that they were at their desks at work and we were able to talk to them live on the "phone" which could be put through the PC speakers because Skype is a VOIP program that's installed on a PC. This is something that could be very useful if AmFam would open up the use of the site rather than blocking it.
When we got to the topic of Wikis, I found this image to be very powerful. (Click the image to see a larger version.)
It explains with a simple image something I've never quite been able to explain in words, and that is that online collaboration is much simpler using a Wiki than it is using email. With a Wiki, everyone is writing and editing the same document, there is a revision history, the ability to track changes, and the ability to have an online discussion without changing the content of the document. For creating Wikis, we talked only very briefly about pbwiki (online) and MediaWiki (downloadable - same platform used by Wikipedia). With most Wikis, there is a learning curve because the writing and editing have to follow a syntax that's kind of learning the basics of HTML, however there are Wiki applications out there that utilize a more WYSIWYG interface, so I'll be on the lookout for one of them. The one we use at AmFam (JSPWiki) is painful to use, and I/S doesn't really want us using it.
In my earlier summary post for day 1 of the workshop, I mentioned delicious.com. Here's an excellent video that explains social bookmarking in plain english. I think you'll find it enlightening.
During the workshop, a lot of attendees were asking how we could keep in touch using Web 2.0 technologies rather than exchanging email addresses. Things got really cool when one of the instructors set up a social network for us on ning.com. You can see our social network here - http://sss2008.ning.com/. This gave me ideas right away for uses within the Education Division. For example, Tom Vitale and Jennifer Viaene were involved in teaching the Transition to Management program. They also used WebEx for 30-60-90 day follow up sessions. I talked to one of the participants from that program and asked him "What now? How do you keep in touch now that the program is over?" He said email and phone are his only options. I believe a site like ning.com would be tremendously useful for a group like his. It allows each person to have their own blog-like page, it has a discussion forum, etc. It's a great way to maintain the communities of practice that we start when we bring people into our classes.
As I was posting short updates on Twitter during the conference, I posted the following at one point: "I'm not sure how we could use this in education, but Evernote is VERY COOL. I need a cell phone with a camera now." The instructor did a demonstration showing us how doing a search in Evernote not only searches through the text in any documents you've saved, but also uses text recognition to find the text in any photos or screen shots you've saved. Check it out. It really is an amazing service and one that I will begin using soon for some personal things.
At one point, the instructors demonstrated the Web Clips widget in the Google Desktop application (blocked by AmFam for some reason) that allows RSS feeds to be delivered right to your PC's desktop. I would love figure out how we can use RSS feeds to deliver small chunks of content right to a user's desktop.
I posted a question in Twitter: "How do we track Learning 2.0 in the LMS??? Is it even important to do so? Is credit necessary for reading 1-2 paragraphs of content?" We talked about this in the workshop. In our AmFam corporate culture, a lot of value has been placed on tracking the completion of a class in your learning plan. Learning just for the sake of learning, which is my philosophy, doesn't seem to be valued as much, so there may be some concern about getting "credit" for learning something.
Another cool site we talked about was Jott.com. I've been testing this site for posting to this blog and to my Twitter, and it has the potential to be very useful. Unfortunately, they are now moving out of beta and will begin charging soon for anything more than the basic services. What is Jott, you ask? Well, check out this Twitter post for one example. I was sitting in my director's office demonstrating some of the things I learned in this workshop. I called Jott from my cell phone, left a brief message, and directed it to post to my Twitter stream. As you can see, my message was transcribed and posted with a link to the actual audio of my phone call. The basic Jott service only allows a 15 second message, so this functionality is mostly useful for Twitter posting when you are away from a PC or web enabled cell phone.
Some other sites I'd like to look into when I have some time (and a short description of each from their website):
udutu - easy-to-use online learning authoring software that allows you to build your course very quickly no matter where you are, and no matter who you need to involve.
moodle - Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities.
37signals - developer and provider of business and personal productivity web applications.
SocialText - developer of business social software and wikis for rapid team communications, knowledge sharing, flexible collaboration, and dynamic social networks.
LearnhHub - social learning network where people teach & learn online.
MIT OpenCourseWare - makes the course materials that are used in the teaching of almost all MIT’s undergraduate and graduate subjects available on the Web, free of charge, to any user anywhere in the world.
Next step - figuring out where to start with (a) getting this information out to others in the department and the division, and (b) implementing some of these tools into my development work.
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