Earlier this week, I posted on the topic of the EduBlogs’ nominations for 2008. I indicated my surprise at the lack of the blogs that I would consider to be deserving nominees for the awards. Brandon Hall’s Gary Woodill took the time to comment on my post, and rightly highlighted that I had perhaps been too extreme asserting that
none of what I would consider the ‘Top 50’ e-learning blogs received a mention.
I subsequently modified my position and highlighted some of the blogs that were in (some of) the categories’ lists that I would subscribe to / reference / admire, including C4LPT, the Bamboo Project, and OLDaily – for I did not have the leisure to peruse all the lists in all the categories… so of course I omitted some other candidates that would be among the e-learning blogs I regularly read, and naturally Workplace Learning Today was among them (as I said in the title of this post– How Not to Win Friends, eh?).
However, upon reflection I have to say that I stand by my initial (modified) position on this topic, and here’s why...
In my view, the primary issue I encountered with this year’s list of categories was that it’s not very usable for voters. As an e-learning professional, usability – the ease with which learners can assimilate content in order to achieve a particular learning objective – is a key factor in developing effective, easily-transferable courseware, as well as informational deliverables generally.
As a result, I found it difficult to engage with the “great wall of links” I encountered when I navigated to each category. The outcome was that I wasn’t motivated to review many of the nominated blogs: I don’t have the time at my disposal to carefully review 
If, for example, a blog* is called “Seán’s Blog”, “Siobhan’s Thoughts”, or “Y(outh) Zone” it’s nigh-well impossible to decipher what topics it covers without some textual descriptors or justification for their appearance on the list - apart from “Best [what ever the category is] Blog”, of course. This isn’t enough detail (for me) to carry out an informed judgment on the relative merits or otherwise of a candidate for an EduBlogs Award.
In the context of the EduBlogs Awards site, the development of an informationally sound content framework should have been a consideration for the authors, to enable them to create an environment conducive to the requirements of voters. At the same time, the content model must make effective use of available technologies, with the express purpose of countering the effects of cognitive overload (there is an imbalance of text to other media types).
The outcome? A lost opportunity to introduce a substantial number of blogs to a wide audience, and a whole lot of frustration at having to work hard to vote.
Just as well there’s no hanging chads online.
Tomorrow: It’s easy to be critical, but I feel that there’s no point in it unless it’s constructive criticism and supports learning.
Gary Woodill asked me to highlight my ‘Top 50’ e-learning blogs. I’m not going to do that, I’ll cover twenty of them, but I would be interested to see if you, dear reader, consider the approach I take to distributing the information to be usable and effective.
FÓGRA: I’ll come back to Chris Argyris anon.
* The blogs depicted in this post are fictitious. Any similarity to any person’s blog living or dead is merely coincidental.
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