Blogging - Not on Company Time?

I saw a post by Dan Roddy - Do you have a blogging policy?

As part of an interview for a new job, he got into a discussion with his potential new employer of their policy was around blogging.

Their response was; if it helps you and you don't give away any secrets, and don't do it in company time, then that would be okay.

The part I find interesting is "don't do it on company time" ... What if it helps the company? What if I'm using blogging as part of my Information Radar? What if I need help from my learning network on a particular work challenge that I can ask without revealing any secrets?

I've blogged before about Corporate Social Media Policies and Corporate Policies on Web 2.0 and my general sense has been that corporate policy would be that it would be okay to blog on company time if you are doing it to help you with your work activities. Am I wrong on this?

Likely there is some balance here and everyone should pay attention to that balance. But making a blanket statement - "Not on company time" seems a bit farther than the policy should be.

Low Cost LMS

I received an inquiry about the need for a low cost LMS solution and I've not had time to help this person with answers. I'm hoping folks can chime in with suggestions and resources. I'll try to aggregate them together.

Situation description:

I have talked to several vendors and have received quotes at the 6-8k (per year) range for the licensing. We have roughly 500 learners and would use the LMS for mainly tracking and registration of ILT courses, communication (possibly through message boards), and posting of class materials. The development of e-Learning is being done through Captivate, so I do not need a system with authoring capabilities.

I have not had much luck with open source LMS programs, mainly because of technical limitations on our part. Do you have any recommendations on which programs to consider? Also, are the price quotes mentioned above reasonable?

What would you suggest?

Also, my guess is that looking at License costs is probably a bad idea here since quite often there are services, hosting, etc. costs that can exceed license costs. So, help on effective all-in low cost LMS solutions would be good.

Tim Seager of Xerceo posted about this issue and suggested a some resources:

• GSA Advantage - This is a very interesting site to visit and see pricing that's been established by contract with the government. Simply type the LMS vendor name or LMS name in the search bar and it should give you the per user/ per installation pricing. Smaller vendors may not be found. And it can be difficult to interpret some of the results. Still fantastic to have a resource with pricing.

• LMS pricing stats by Richard Nantel. These include the hosted and locally deployed implementations from 2007.

Another way to tackle this kind of Search is to use the exact approach I tell folks about in my presentations like the recent ASTD Keynote.

~inexpensive ("learning management system" OR lms) 2007..2009 filetype:pdf
~inexpensive ("learning management system" OR lms) 2007..2009 filetype:ppt

This netted some interesting material including the following list that is the list in the Brandon Hall report.

• Absorb LMS (Blatant Media e-Learning)
• Acadia HCS (Acadia HCS)
• Allen Communication Learning Portal
• Avilar WebMentor
• Course-Source (Course-Source Limited)
• CourseMill LMS (Trivantis)
• DOTS (WebRaven)
• ED Training Platform (Strategia)
• Generation 21 Enterprise
• InforSource (InfoSource)
• Inquisiq EX (ICS Learning Group Inc.)
• IntraLearn XE (IntraLearn Software)
• Isoph Blue (Learn Something)
• Kallidus LMS (e2train)
• LearnerWeb (MaxIT)
• LearnShare LMS (Learnshare)
• LMS Live (Wizdom Systems)
• MindFlash E-Learning System
• NetDimensions EKP Bronze
• OnPoint Learning & Performance Suite
• On-Tracker LMS (Interactive Solutions)
• OutStart Evolution LMS (OutStart)
• SSElearn Portal (SSE)
• Syntrio Enterprise (Syntrio)
• TeraLearn LMS (Teralearn.com)
• The Learning Manager (Worldwide Interactive)
• Tracker.Net (Platte Canyon)
• TrainingPartner (Geometrix)
• TrainingMine (Frontline Data Solutions)
• Upside LMS (Upside Learning Solutions)
• Virtual Training Assistant (RISC)

What systems are missing here? How would you potentially proceed through this list?

Maybe it's money well spent to buy the report?

I tried to find information from the eLearningGuild, but had a hard time finding anything. You can certainly go back and look at: LMS Satisfaction Features and Barriers. It's getting a bit old now, but you can at least see a little about some of these systems.

Notetaking Tools Help Needed

I recently engaged in a conversation with someone who suggested I was way behind the curve in adopting a better notetaking tool. They picked up on my comments in Better Memory about still using notepad for taking notes in lots of cases.

There are a lot of tools out there in this space. I've looked at EverNote and OneNote quite a bit, but I'm not convinced yet that they fit well enough for me to adopt.

Requirements -

• Desktop Search Integration. I currently use Windows Desktop Search and would prefer that I can find notes via the same mechanism that searches my email and documents.
• No Lock In. I need to believe that I could get my notes out of the system later if I decided I needed to switch tools.
  
• Better Copy to Clipboard. Includes links along with web contents when you clip.
  
• iPhone Notes. Nice to be able to take notes on the iPhone and have that come across into the system. I don't need all my notes available to me on the iPhone.

Curious any thoughts? Right now, I'm leaning towards trying OneNote, but I'm concerned about Lock In and that I don't believe there's any iPhone support? Should I just wait for another year until it matches these requirements better?

Index Page

I saw a post by Ken Allan discussing what he calls an Index Page. Part of the inspiration for his index page comes from my First Time Visitor Guide page. As I describe on this page, the challenge that it tries to address is:

It can be daunting to visit a blog for the first time. The author(s) have been writing individual articles for months or years. This is my attempt to help you get a sense of topics of my blog and find some of the more interesting past articles.

Ken's Index Page description seems to try to tackle a similar, but possibly different issue:

my intention is to provide an index to popular posts and those of general interest only.

In fact, Stephen's recent discussion about Serialized Feeds while focusing quite differently, got me thinking again. He points out that the flow of information via an RSS (and thus how a reader experiences is most recent first). However, it was produced and the story is really from oldest to newest. And isn't a blog is best experienced through on-going reading over the course of time? Which leaves us with a question:

How do we create resources on our blogs that will help a
new reader or a
search visitor
understand what's there and orient themselves?

I distinguish the two types. A new reader is going to pick things up from there. A search visitor is going to explore and may come back periodically, but will not subscribe. I definitely do not have the right answer here, so I want to raise some issues and then I definitely would like to get ideas and help.

Index Page as Jump Off Point

Ken has some interests statistics collected around his Index Page. He looks at time on page and numbers of views. My statistics suggest that the Index Page is used as a quick jump off point to other pages. It actually has a fairly low exit percentage, but a below average time on page. Most people spend a significantly longer time on pages with meatier content.

Thus, I see one of the primary goals of the index page or however, we define these resources as being a place where you can understand the various topics of the blog and find the best posts on those topics.

Large Index Pages - Daunting

Ken Allan and I have discussed this before (see the First Time post for some of the discussion). Ken told me that his experience with my page:

It all made more sense to me on second time through, some months on though. At first reading, I found it a daunting post to take in.

I completely agree. That the size of both my page and Ken's page are quite large and overwhelming. This is probably the classic "wanting to tell everyone about all the great stuff."

The thoughts that we came up with was that realistically an Index Page needs a couple of parts:

1. First Time Visitor information that gives just a few seminal posts that will get someone into the flow.
2. An Index Page with lots of the topics and the best stuff related to that topic.

Index Page Worth the Effort?

I find myself updating the index page about every six months based on posts like 2008 2009.

However, it is a lot of work to manually keep this page up to date, so unless I've already pulled the information together, it's doesn't seem like it's worth the effort.

Ken suggested that it would be better if I periodically post to remind people to visit the page. This certainly increases the value.

At the same time, Index Page needs to be easy to keep current.

Design of an Index Page?

I'm not quite sure I get what a good Index Page design would have on it.

I'm hoping folks will help me with design ideas. How would you structure your page? Or better yet, create your index page?

Automated Index Page?

And here's the rub. The technology that is currently running eLearning Learning has some capability to produce something pretty close to an Index Page. It can show me the "best" (based on social signals) of my blog:

Best All Time Posts on eLearning Technology

It has best based on particular keywords:

Best eLearning 2.0 Posts from eLearning Technology

Which then quickly springboards into

Best on Adoption and eLearning 2.0 from eLearning Technology

Or it can show recent and best for a topic:

Recent and Best for eLearning 2.0

I regularly find myself using it to find my own content because the search is better than Blogger's search. For example, as I was creating this post, I looked at eLearning Technology Blogging.

Right now, there is no view for a blog that is like an Index Page, but maybe we can create it. So, let's start with what an Index Page should look like, and then I will try to figure out if I can help create something similar automatically.

In fact, I wonder if this raises a bigger, more interesting questions:

• Should the design of a blog be for regular readers or for first time and casual readers?
• Should there be multiple views of a blog?
• What should those views be?

Wow, this could be a very interesting conversation with potentially big impact. I hope you will join in and help.

What Goes in the LMS?

Recently I posted on Learning Materials asking the question -

What Goes in the LMS?

The responses via comments were truly fantastic. In fact, they were too fantastic to have them "buried" as comments. And I wanted to add some of my thoughts, so I'm post again on this topic.

Oh, and, as always, the answer is "it depends" - but let's try to come up with a few suggestions...

Should go in the LMS -

• Only finished content.
• Anything with per-learner, strict tracking requirements.
• Certification/Accreditation management: companies still need to know who went through which course and when, and what was his/her score at the end of it.
• Learning paths: some competencies require that content is presented in a specific order, an order that could be hardly reproduced in informal learning by learners without direct guidance.
• Content that's associated with the course content.

Should not go in the LMS -

• Content that doesn't need strict tracking.
• Content that needs fast access

Other thoughts -

• Put things in both places
• Build a rich web of connections to make sure they connect together