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Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Aha Moments in 2007

The Big Question is back...

December Big Question - What did you learn about learning?

I'm going after this just a little bit different. I wanted to go back and figure out what things really struck me during 2007....

So I first went back to what I wrote about last year:

Some of the more specific memories from 2006:
  • I started my blog in February 2006.

  • I started using del.icio.us and Yahoo MyWeb to save bookmarks - locally saved favorites seem rather limited now.

  • I had a real "aha experience" after using add-ins to provide features inside my blog. Boy were they easy to use. It's all pure service. And this experience kept coming all during the year with Wikis, and more (Incredibly Cool! Vision of Future of Application and eLearning Development)

  • I found myself no longer recommending the use of RoboInfo or other similar programs for reference materials. Wikis are way better even if the end-users don't edit.

  • I had a very interesting disagreement with a client about the technical direction for their solution - they wanted local editing via a Word add-in locally installed - I advocated providing a pure web delivered solution. I lost the argument. In the long run, they'll lose. No one should advocate putting stuff on a desktop anymore without a dang good reason.

  • I found myself using Wikipedia early in research tasks on all sorts of topics.

But by far the most vivid memory of 2006 comes from a comment made during a panel that I was moderating on eLearning 2.0. We had discussed Wikis, Blogs and were embarking on Second Life. Someone from the audience in all sincerity said:

“This stuff is freaking me out.”

She is right on the money. It is freaking us out. We know something pretty special is happening right now.

If you are a glutton for more of this, take a look at:

Wow, what a great list from 2006, I'm glad I have that saved somewhere. ;)

So how about in here's a random list of things from 2007:
But probably the biggest sign of the times for me is that I personally find myself working on helping lots of organizations figure out how social media, new technologies, etc. affect them and their users.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for a top post! Great to see the serendipity at work here. As I look back over a year of 'aha moments' in e-learning I'd agree the 'freak-out factor' rates highly in responses to Web 2.0. I've been using the gentle persuasion approach of step by step, little by little ... getting used to the idea of the technology in learning.