Articulate, Captivate, Dreamweaver and Lectora Tops in eLearning Authoring Tool Satisfaction

I was somewhat surprised that my post: Course Authoring and Rapid eLearning Tool Satisfaction didn't generate more interest. You can see the detailed view of the sat numbers here.

This data shows that the Articulate tools, Adobe Captivate and Dreamweaver and Lectora are near the top for elearning course authoring. While tools such as Toolbook and Authorware are down a bit.

What surprised me is that there wasn't more discussion around this. Is this just common knowledge these days? Do people buy this?

Conference Preparation

As I'm thinking about going to the eLearningGuild Annual Gathering in Boston next month and ASTD in Atlanta in June, I went back to look at some notes I had created before around getting ready for conferences ... Be an Insanely Great Professional Conference Attendee

And the net of it was that you really needed to be prepared with good questions, which I had talked about in: Better Questions for Learning Professionals

Then, I realized that the LCB Big Question from February would be a good thing to look back at:

• Continuing Thoughts on Questions
• What Questions Should We be Asking?
• http://learningcircuitblog.pbwiki.com/bigquestions

I also ran across this good post: Conference Survival Guide for the Web Worker with some good suggestions.

New Debate on Value of Blogs and Wikis in the Enterprise

There's some conversation going on around whether blogs provide value in the Enterprise. In Blog? I don't need no stinkin' blog!, Jim Lee tells us:

Now let me go on record to say that I do believe that both blogs and wikis have some value—just not business value—at least not yet.

He asks WIIFM and for the reader and doesn't feel there's value. Jack Vinson responds with Do blogs fit in the enterprise? and has a lot of really good points around blogging. His post is definitely worth reading and thinking about. For example:

People want to blog in enterprises. People are blogging in enterprises. Why? I don't think people are interested in the minutiae of their colleagues' lives. They don't have the time or inclination to read that kind of material. But what is interesting? People read and respond to topics that are relevant to their interests -- their work, their passions. Let's say someone is blogging about a particularly interesting client conversation. Someone else could see it and recount their own, similar experience with a resolution - either on their own blog or in email back to the first person. Or, they might recount the story over lunch and find connections to several other related stories. These then make it back as references to relevant materials in the corporate repository, references to people who have had similar experiences.

This is a topic that's been discussed quite a bit before by folks in our world. A tongue-in-cheek summary can be found at: Top Ten Reasons To Blog and Top Ten Not to Blog. But, I would want to make sure that Jim understands two critical points about blogging.

1. WIIFM - Why did teachers force you to write in school? Because the act of composition commits the learning. Take heed when people tell you that they've learned more via blogging than through any other means. I feel exactly the same way. I get value even without much interaction.
   
2. You do get conversation and tremendous value from this. Maybe Jim doesn't want the value of this conversation around blogging. But we are all getting value from his perspective - because likely he echoes what others are thinking.

Interesting Distribute Publishing Model and Open Source

(via Stephen Downes) Impact of Open Source Software on Education, Series Launch is interesting both because of the publishing model and because of the content.

The publishing model is something we might want to consider at LCB. What they've done is recruit authors who are going to publish (via a blog) something between a blog post, interview and an article every other week on a particular topic - in this case Open Source. Each post will have comments, questions, etc. from readers. They have a Wiki (“Impact of Open Source Software on Education” series, visit WikiEducator) that they apparently use/used to get the authors to fill in their information about what they would write.

This sounds like a really good distributed version of a publishing model that is similar to what you would find at many magazines. I'm curious if people have thoughts on whether this model might be an interesting alternative to the LCB Big Question?

Supporting New Managers

Ray Sims has been doing great stuff over on his blog: Sims Learning Connections. I've just read his answer to this month's big question - What Would You Do to Support New Managers? - Supporting New Managers With Informal Learning - good stuff. Worth taking a look at.

While I'm on it - one of the most important aspects of helping managers transition is to effectively support and coach them over time. The question is always how do they get that coaching support.

Some of the most effective performance interventions that I've been involved in targets both the performer and their manager with regular on-going support.

In this case, new managers, I would certainly target their managers with regular (every two weeks) email messages giving them specific conversation topics.

This is not quite as effective of a design as I've done in the past because I've always received commitment from the individuals on an Action Plan. But, still just reminding and helping to spark the right conversations (right Jay?) is key.

Speaking of which - how about regular conference calls with fellow new managers to discuss issues?

Referral Relationships and Selection Process

Saw a post by Justyn Howard Who took the 'consult' out of 'consulting'? where he says that:

I've witnessed more than one example of e-Learning and LMS consultants who are hired by an organization to help select a vendor and create a deployment strategy. These practitioners then simply present 3-4 solutions that they have "referral" relationships with, see which one sticks and collect a check (from the client and the vendor).

I have to agree with him that there's a definite conflict of interest if you are simultaneously advising on selection and have any kind of paid relationship with that vendor. I would expect that consultants would disclose that information, but it appears that everyone actually needs to ask - and probably ask both the consultant and the vendor - maybe even ask for it in writing.

Having been involved in this process for many years, I can't imagine how a consultant can do this. You have to be working in the best interest of the client. They are hiring you to act on their behalf as part of their team.

I'm really curious if this is something that's happening much out there. I wish Justyn could name names.

More on Blogger Meta Tag Issue

A couple of comments came in on my post Important Notice to Blogger Blog Owners that made me realize I hadn't included a full description of what I ended up doing.

As a reminder the problem is that Blogger had inserted:

<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW"$gt

This tells the Google spider not to index this page.

To get rid of it, you can remove:

<$BlogMetaData$>

However, this also removes a few other lines from your file that includes your autodiscovery of RSS feeds. So, what you really want to do is:

1. Go to your blog
2. View Source - Original
3. See if you have the NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW
4. If you do, then keep that View Source window open
5. Go to Blogger
6. Edit your template and remove the BlogMetaData tag
7. Preview your Blog
8. View Source - with it removed
9. Copy all the lines in the Original that it had been inserting except for the ROBOTS
10. Paste those into your template manually
11. Preview
12. Save

Unfortunately, this means that future changes by Blogger to Meta Data you won't get automatically. Of course, getting NOFOLLOW was a great new feature for them to add.