Person in the Picture + great design methods: Janet Clarey from Brandon Hall Research

Over the years I have been enjoying Janet Clarey's blogposts very much. They are insightful as well as practical. Her writing (and comments) also show her passion for the eLearning related job, and life in general.

Janet is "an industry analyst and researcher. She covers social media, microlearning, e-learning, instructional design, and learning technologies for the workplace." (got this from the about section on her blog). She is a frequent publisher for Brandon Hall (an independent research center specialized in new media for corporations) and she delivers a lot of presentations, I have not seen her perform live, but I sure think she can liven up a room with her knowledge looking at her online dynamics. Brandon Hall research is not completely free for all it's research, but Janet is always willing to share her knowledge and add to any eLearning discussion with relevance and meaning. Her main interest is in corporate learning, but once you start reading her, you will see that she crosses all borders of the eLearning realm.

Her blog features an abundance of eLearning tips and tricks and why I wanted to put her in the picture right now is because of a recent post that got me into design thinking mode. In this post she refers to the D.School (at Stanford) Bootcamp Bootleg free download , which is "a curated collection of material developed by teaching teams throughout the design world over the last five years." This pdf can be downloaded here.

What can you expect to find in the pdf? The editors of the document summarize it as follows:
"The guide outlines each mode of a human-centered design process, and describes a number of methods which may support your design thinking throughout the process. These process modes and methods provide a tangible toolkit which support the seven d.mindsets ̶ shown on the following page ̶ which we feel are vital attitudes for a design thinker to hold." Personally I like the bodystorming technique that is described as one of the methods.

Basically this 36 page document provides you with some great tools that can prevent you from ever getting stuck in an eLearning or writers block ever again.



Now, if you want to stay on top of a variety of eLearning and social media topics like the one above, get Janet's blog onto your blog-roll or feedreader (if you have not done so already, that is).

Using transparency to get citizens alert and active, or how Christian Kreutz influenced my thinking

It has been a very hectic period over the last couple of weeks. A tight workshop, planning a facilitator training, a short course with a lot of online activity, budget hassles, my master starting up … and this kept me from writing posts on a regular basis. I was also in an existential dip on blogposting.

Lucky for me I had one fresh and inspiring encounter at the middle of these chaotic weeks: meeting Christian Kreutz. His blog has been an inspiration for the last couple of years and all of a sudden I had the chance to meet him in Brussels.

Engaging citizens by analyzing (internet) data – civil society
We had an informal meeting, but a lot of what I learned from him made sense and sharpened my overall thinking on the use of websites and the internet to get civil society moving.

So what did Christian say that I found so enlightening? He simply said that we have all this data at our fingertips (google statistics, geo information, …), and all of these available data could be used for the better of society and its citizens.
In the past he has been writing about it. He wrote on metrics for social networks and what really happens, focusing on knowledge sharing and learning, he wrote about 6 innovative mashups for transparency, in which you could see the impact certain decisions have on the social fabric of regions (I was especially struck by the Healthcarethatworks – website that shows the New York City wide status for hospitals and its disproportionate impact that recent hospital closures have on low-income communities.) and his most recent post was on maptivism as a new approach of activism (based on the estimate that as much as 80% of data contains geo-referenced information. So, a lot of information can be displayed through maps. Digital maps allow easy ways to present large amounts of data and reduce complexity.)

The internet started out as a Utopia for me. It would benefit people around the world and make the globe a better place. With the increased absorption of internet initiatives into corporate environments, some of that euphoric belief in the WWW disappeared. But after reading the possibilities posted by Christian and after our talk in which he put forward the extra’s a transparent use of existing data (both on regional, national and international level) could bring… I am again a radiant believer. He gave a wonderful and simple example to get people interested in their own social environment. What if we take the data from a specific part of a city and open this data up to the citizens, e.g. people could see where trash bins are located, light poles are implemented, benches are placed... if city council than wants to change the outlines of that specific areas, or do something to create a better living space for all its citizens in that location, it could show the citizens what is already there, and ask them how they think their living area could be improved. I agree that a lot of debate could come from this, but coming to a consensus as a group can also adds to the social fabric of a region. All this data is already available, but in many occasions very little is done with it.

Christian Kreutz blogs qualitatively, which makes his blog a gem, check it out. He is thinking about going fully into consulting, so if you feel the need for a very professional, citizen-oriented web-analysis-expert, send him a note.

If you know of any data being used to make society more transparent, let me know, I would love to get more ideas.

25 free eLearning tools + person in the picture: Jane Hart

In my quest to realize a Star Trek-ian society within my lifetime I wish to promote free tools, eLearning tools at that. One of the great recent repositories is Jane Hart’s Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies. Everyone could build a repository with free eLearning tools, but she did it by distilling the top 100 tools that were provided to her by expert eLearning colleagues from all around the world. While surfing to her list, you get a nice bonus: each tool has a small tutorial linked to it. Nice.

The top 10 free tools lists Firefox, delicious, Google reader, Gmail, skype, Google calendar, Google docs, slideshare, flickr and voicethread.

Just take a look at her complete list and see which ones you use or ask a couple of your colleagues if they are using any. For me I use 17 of those tools actively for my own use. I never counted the tools up until now and I am quite surprised that I use that many and a lot of them on a daily basis and I wonder how many tools I use all together.

Jane Hart does more then just deliver lists; she has a blog which serves knowledge in small pieces: Jane’s eLearning pick of the day, a very interesting set of posts that regularly give the reader an AHA feeling.

The list for free tools is great, the need for it is clear. However this got me thinking. Why is it that the most useful things most of the time stare us in the face, yet are not taken for granted to the point they could be? Jane Hart is a great eLearning professional because she pins down what is important and distributes it to anyone who is interested. Anyone could come up with a similar list, but she did it. To be honest I was a bit jealous because I thought I could have come up with such a list, certainly if I would ask around, but then … I did not. So I wonder if really great teachers are characterized by their power to see simple useful things, put them into context and distribute them in an easy understandable way.