Blogging Challenges

I just saw a post by a relatively new blogger - I’m Back… and What Happened?

In it, Angela tells us about how she "fell behind" in her blogging and then found she had trouble "catching up" ...

• Then, I started saving “clippings” that I planned to respond to but fell behind and the subjects got old.
• Did I mention that I fell behind and everything that I was excited about seemed to get “old”?
• Then I thought I had to “catch up” in order to post again.

I can understand her sense of concern about how quickly subjects come and go in the blogosphere. However, there is now way that you can keep up and weigh in on every subject / conversation going on out there. It's just too much. Instead, you have to pick subjects that interest you or that you can relate to your work. There is no "keeping up" nor "catching up" ... there's only letting go.

The harder question is what to do when you are behind and there's a great subject that interests you, but it's been a couple weeks since anyone posted about it. My personal feeling is that if you have something to add to the conversation, it's still good to weigh in on it. The reason is that while you may not get much response or interaction, it still helps you complete your thoughts around the subject (that interested you).

Angela also told us:

Plus, I was so incredibly inspired about my work in the last three weeks that I worked harder than ever before and I was too tired to post at the end of the day!

It's ok to have time off from your blog, it will hurt readership and hurts conversation a bit, but that happens to pretty much everyone. On the flip side, if you are incredibly busy with something that's inspiring you, how about sharing about that. Start a new conversation around whatever you are doing. Or just talk about what's going on. Take a look at Wendy's blog - In the Middle of the Curve. She does a wonderful job of capturing what she's dealing with day-to-day, how she has approached things, what works, what doesn't, what she is concerned about. It's really an incredible case study. Maybe you can't do as much with your blog, but still capture what's inspiring you.

Using My Mouse to Magnify During Presentations

When I'm doing a presentation, especially one that involves demonstrations of software, I often use Magnify to zoom in on a portion of the screen. I often get asked after the presentation how I do it and I just got asked via email the same question. The honest answer is that I stumbled into my solution having bought a Microsoft Mouse that included the Magnifier feature. This allowed me to assign a mouse button (even without the special button such as the zoom wheel click) to be the magnify option. This is extremely handy.

A slightly less handy option is the built in Windows Accessibility tool Magnifier. You can find it by going to Start >> Programs >> Accessories >> Accessibility >> Magnifier. It's pretty easy from there. The only problem I have with it is that I have to fiddle with it too much during the presentation. Clicking the button is much faster.

If you don't want to buy a Microsoft Mouse with the Magnify feature, then I'd suggest you take a look into one of these inexpensive applications that claim to do the same thing. I've not used these - so if you have, please let me know what you find out.

http://www.dirfile.com/freeware/mouse-magnifier.htm
http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/downloads/mouse_magnifier_software/

Personal Learning Knowledge Work Environment

I've been reading a lot over the past few months around Personal Learning Environments and a lot of related material. What sparks this post is the combination of a recent post by Stephen Downes that includes a brief exchange with Jay Cross in the comments and some interesting discussions in the Enterprise 2.0 world that included a post by Bill Ives - Managing Personal Knowledge: Setting a Foundation for Transformation? In it, he points out that a stepping stone to Enterprise 2.0 adoption is getting folks to manage their personal knowledge and adopt practices like blogging for personal knowledge management (PKM) and personal learning.

What this has come to make me realize is that for the vast majority of knowledge workers (including myself), there should be no separation between my Personal Learning Environment (PLE), my Personal Knowledge Management system, and my day-to-day set of tools that enhance my knowledge worker productivity. Learning-Knowledge-Work - they really are the same and I need to do them all at once. (See also Knowledge Work Not Separate from Learning). As I compose this blog post, which am I doing? All.

Maybe there are some distinctions between personal knowledge management, personal learning and knowledge productivity. I can't claim that I really understand these distinctions, but I can say with certainty that systems or environments that provide support for these need to operate together. If you make these independent and distinct, it will be really annoying for us knowledge workers.

So, any suggestion on what the name for this system (or environment) should be? Certainly PLE and PKM would seem to be too limited, right?

And, if there's really only one environment, then what's in it?

For now, my sense is that we are all experimenting with different solutions pulled together from different tools. Take a look at a few of the following for examples:

• My Personal Learning Environment
• Ray's Personal Learning Environment
• Reaching Nirvana in my Personal Learning Environment
• Personal Learning Environments - the future of eLearning?
• Personal Learning
  

These would seem to be summed up pretty well by Graham Attwell in Questions and Answers on Peronal Learning Environments:

Yes, I do have my own PLE, comprised of a ‘mash up’ of different desktop and web based applications I use for my everyday work and increasingly reliant on local and web based services. It isn’t particularly efficient and it has some pretty big gaps at the moment – but I hope to develop it further over the next year. Central to my PLE is the people I work with and the applications I use for communication with those people.

There's been quite a bit of other discussion around what these things might be:

• PLEs - what are we talking about here?
• Personal Learning Environments (PLEs)
• Personal Learning Environments and personal learning environments
• My Personal Learning Environment

And if those aren't enough you can go to PLE Links and the PLE Wiki.

One thing that I'm left wondering is how this is different from all the discussion around productivity.

For me it's become more a question of the day-to-day processes I use on top of these tools and how the tools have adjusted how I do things. My life is different now than before I used an RSS reader and wrote a blog. It's also different since I adopted the practice of taking notes only on my laptop and heavy use of desktop search instead of trying organize things as much.

I'm not sure how to make sense of all of this yet, but I know things have changed and I'm not sure that discussing Personal Learning Environments separate from the rest of these changes is helping me.

Is it e-Learning or eLearning?

I just saw Gabe's post E-Learning: Will We One Day Lose the E? that discuss my post eLearning or Learning? - More to It. One of the things that Gabe tells us is:

Based on Google queries, e-learning (about 200,000,000 results) takes the cake over elearning (about 14,400,000 results) in 2007. So the world seems to like the hyphen.

My results are a little different but there certainly are more pages out there that have the hypen.

However, I actually believe the trend is more to drop the hypen. To back me up I went to Google Trends to see what the trend is for people searching. Here's what I saw:

Worldwide -


"eLearning" has almost caught "e-Learning" in terms of what people use in their searches.

In the United States -


"eLearning" is used more often in searches than "e-Learning" ...

Bottom line, like Gabe mentioned e-mail got shortened to email, I would be surprised if eLearning doesn't become the term of choice.

eLearning or Learning? - More to It

I just saw a post by B.J. Schone -Is the Term ‘eLearning’ Going to Become Extinct? In his post, B.J. points to a post that I had seen as well but he tracks the issue back to an article from CLO Magazine that discusses the renaming of the E-Learning Industry Group in Europe. According to the article:

The E-Learning Industry Group is now the European Learning Industry Group, a change that reflects a shift within the organization itself, as well as within the learning industry.

“The term ‘e-learning’ has been overused,” said Joe Hegarty, Intel Innovation Centres director of business operations. “Technology is now clearly embedded in all modern learning solutions.”

This is certainly an issue that has been discussed a lot. Do a search for "drop the e" elearning and you'll get 74 results, but there are literally thousands more out there. Including an earlier article from CLO itself: What's in a Name? and a post by me: What to Call Ourselves and Our Industry?

I definitely sympathize with the sentiment about dropping the "e" from eLearning because we are really focused on the same problem as people who are involved in learning - and likely they use digital technologies (the "e" part) to accomplish parts of that.

However, I'm still with B.J. that it's still helpful to have a term for the fact that we are discussing the use of the digital technologies. So, it's still helpful to me to use the "e".

I really think there's a lot more to this question these days. Take a look back at my post: More on Personal Learning Environments. There I discuss a post by Ray Sims where he makes the point that we are converging on solutions that:

combine learning AND doing.

Certainly, my environments are combined. Am I learning right now or doing. Both. And I would say the concepts of Personal Knowledge Management, personal information management, Performance Support tools, ePerformance, Productivity Systems, etc. are not that far away. Really, once you get to information and doing, you pretty much are talking about everything an information worker does.

Clark Quinn and I had a conversation about this issue back in December 2006. And we lamented that we don't really have a good term to describe the broader range of systems that we work on. I tend to get involved when there's opportunity to do something more creative or interesting with technology that goes beyond what is often labeled as "eLearning."

For example, one system we built took customer satisfaction scores already being collected by the organization, combined it with management best practices, to form an action plan. There's was almost no "eLearning" - really these were tools. It took a sophisticated person in the organization to know how to cross boundaries (Operations, Marketing/Survey Research, Training, HR) to get it to happen. And at the end of the day, I would claim this was much more eManagement than eLearning. It really aimed at helping managers understand what they needed to accomplish, create a plan to accomplish it, get buy-in from others around the plan, track the plan, get conversations to happen around the plan in an on-going fashion. Basically, if you had coaches or good managers, they would be doing this in an ad hoc fashion.

What do you call this?

After watching the video yesterday of Everything is Miscellaneous, I find myself questioning the value of trying to define terms. At the same time, terminology in some form (e.g., tags) is critical to help us understand where things fit. For example, what conference should I go to where I would find people who create similar kinds of solutions or who are interested in working together on this kind of solution? It would be great if there was an accepted term because likely I could find the conference.

Clark and I are still struggling with these questions as are many, many other people. Likely there are no simple answers, but finding how to discuss these things, making sense of them is important for us to be able to explain what it is we do.