My Top 25 blogs for 2008

As discussed in yesterday's post, here are my Top 25 blogs for 2008. Hopefully there's enough detail, laid out in a usable fashion, to encourage you to try out a few of the links.

Blog Name	Author	Description
Brain Rules	John Medina	12 Principles for Surviving at Work, Home, and School
Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies	Jane Hart	Knowledge, Skills and Tools for the Learning 2.0 Age
Clive on Learning	Clive Shepherd	Clive Shepherd has spent the past 25 years working with computers trying to make learning things happen electronically. He's still trying to figure it out.
Connecting 2 the World	Virginia Yonkers	Connecting ideas, cultures, and disciplines
Corporate eLearning Strategies and Development	Brent Schlenker	Corporate Learning Blogger, Strategist, Consultant exploring the crossroads of Technology and Learning.
Elearning Technology	Tony Karrer	Tony Karrer's blog on Elearning trends
elearningpost	Maish R Nichani	elearningpost provides news and views into the process and practice of e- learning.
Elearnspace	George Siemens	Explores elearning, knowledge management, networks, technology, and community.
Experiencing E-Learning	Christy Tucker	Technology Skills for Instructional Designers
Internet Time	Jay Cross	Internet Time Group helps organizations improve the performance of their people by speeding up their learning.
Learning Circuits Blog	ASTD	Home of the LCB Big Question
Learning Visions	Cammy Bean	Musings on e-Learning, instructional design and other tidbits
Leisurely Theorems	Bill Brandon	Notes about learning and performance.
liquid elearning	Michelle Gallen	Thoughts on e-learning – what's new, what works and what's plain daft
Off Course - On Target	Wayne Hodgins	Perspectives on human performance improvement, knowledge management, learning, and the general nature of design.
OLDaily	Stephen Downes	Covers the world of online learning, and as a daily there is an expectation that it will be fresh, that it will contain the news of the day.
Plan B	Donald Clark	What is Plan B? Not Plan A!
Rapid Elearning	Tom Kuhlmann	Practical, real-world tips for e-learning success
Rapid Elearning News	Ted Cocheu	Where common sense is spoken about workplace learning
rElearn	Eamon Costello	reuse repurpose rElearn
The Bamboo Project	Michele Martin	Career Development, Technology and Learning Strategies for Personal and Professional Growth
Weblogg-ed	Will Richardson	Insights into blogs, wikis and podcasts for learning
Workplace Learning Today	Brandon Hall Research	Daily summary of news and articles about all aspects of employee training

... and my favorite e-learning blog:

The E-Learning Curve Blog

Michael Hanley

An elearning blog about enhancing performance, knowledge, and expertise through technology in learning.

...of course!

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Concerning EduBlogs’ Nominations, or How NOT to Win Friends…

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 each nominee and weigh them against each other as carefully as I would have liked.

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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Salasaga: an Open Source E-Learning IDE

I recently authored a series of posts on developing e-learning content using an open source environment where I investigated the potential for creating and delivering e-learning using either free to use or freely available content authoring applications. In that series, I deliberately excluded mentioning tools to enable the capturing and post-producing demos and simulations, as the applications currently available that enable developers to create high-quality SWF-based content (such as Captivate and Articulate) come with a hefty price tag. However, that may be about to change.

Now read on.

For a while, I've been following the development path of an open source integrated development environment (IDE) called The Flame Project which

brings what Adobe Captivate offers to the Windows community, to Linux/*nix and others. The final aim is to provide functionality superior to Adobe Captivate, by enabling production of in-depth eLearning with properly verifiable results.

Flame has been renamed Salasaga, and the application is now available as and alpha release for Linux Ubuntu.



The developers' vision is

...imagine a free, easy to use GUI authoring environment that helps you create visually impressive and actually useful learning material. The short term goal for this project is to provide such an environment, and we're well on the way to a first release for doing that.

Initially similar to Adobe Captivate, but will eventually incorporate an AJAX (browser based) playback capability for advanced content. Flash has at least one serious design limitation (from my POV) making it nearly useless for comprehensive eLearning, and this appears to be addressed by the existing capabilities of AJAX in browsers these days.

As an alpha release, the IDE is not stable or functional enough to be used in a production environment, but in my view it shows great potential (particularly now that Adobe have opened up the runtime on Flash (as reported here), thereby freeing up developers to actually work with the code from the 'inside.'

Where Salasaga differs from tools like the popular Jing screen capture application, is that the former is available under the GNU LGPL, the latter is a free-to-use product created by TechSmith (of Camtasia fame). While Jing is a great little tool, it is, as the owners say "free for now" - similarly, the owners decline to state for how long the application will be publicly available. Finally, Jing content created by all its users is stored and delivered on TechSmith's ScreenCast streaming media hosting service, which locks content creators in to using TechSmith's solution end-to-end.

From an open source development perspective, this is not ideal.

The current system requirements to run Salasaga are:

Operating Systems

• Linux
• *BSD
• Solaris Nevada
• Windows XP - No development build presently available
• Windows Vista - No development build presently available

Most recent distributions of Linux should work out of the box. Debian Testing on AMD64 has specifically been reported to work.

Please note that the *BSD, Solaris Nevada, and Windows testing only gets done around package creation time.

Requirements

• Glib and GTK+ - version 2.10 or higher of both is known to work
• Pango - version 1.16 or higher is known to work
• libxml2 - version 2.6.30 or higher is known to work
• Ming - version 0.3.0 or higher is known to work

Click here to view a short demo about installing Salasaga - presumably recorded and produced using the IDE.
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