Small Group Breakout Sessions at Conferences

There's a great discussion in the comments on my post around small group discussions at conferences. I've updated the original post a bit and would welcome additional thoughts over the next two days in order to help me figure out what I'm going to do in my session at ASTD TechKnowledge.

Note Taking Help

I'm doing some web research (actually I'm constantly doing web research) and I consistently find myself:

1. Finding an interesting page
2. Copying and Pasting Content from the Page
3. Creating a small citation to the page
4. Editing my thoughts

This is part of creating blog posts or part of doing research.

I've looked at various tools to use as part of this, but I'm finding that what I really want is a better Copy-to-Clipboard function (in Firefox) that would include a citation to the original source as part of the copy operation. In other words, it would combine steps 2 & 3.

Any suggestions on that?

Also, I've been evaluating various clipping, note taking tools such as Zotero, Clipmarks, Google Notebook and my frank opinion is that it forces me to use an interface that is limited as compared to putting it into a large document to play with. Any thoughts on this?

Conference Session Breakout

Update: 12/19/2007. There has been great discussion in the comments. I wanted to provide a bit more context for this.

The session will be workforce learning professionals (an ASTD audience). They will range greatly in terms of the kinds of organizations, their experience.

I'm trying to get them to think about the question "How might you use Blogs, Wikis, Social Bookmarking, Social Networking, Collaboration Tools in your organization?"

I have a list of about 30 ideas, but I think it's useful to think about your organization, your specific context and come up with ideas for where these things might apply. I was planning to do this in small groups and then have them come back together in the larger group. But what I'm hearing is that this is not a good choice...

Original post ... Uh oh, I just saw a post by Donald Clark slamming the use of small group breakouts during conference sessions.

It’s a tired old fossil of a format.

The topic for discussion is usually some ill-defined, banal question, so the group spend a further ten minutes clarifying what’s expected. The time left is usually far too short to get anything meaningfully debated and agreed. Even then it’s often a random selection of thoughts, rants and personal beefs.

Feedback to the group consists of a series of disjointed thoughts, often weighted towards the thoughts of the facilitator. These are scribbled up on acres of flipchart pages blue-tacked on the wall, thereby ruining the décor of the room. The problem here is that this is hardly ever distilled into any sensible points for action.

You’re generally left feeling short-changed.

Uh oh ...

I was pulling together my slides for ASTD TechKnowledge and had planned to do a small group breakout and then have each group contribute to the larger group. This is not something I normally do. And I've certainly had some of the experiences that Donald describes. Now I'm worried.

Do I still do the breakout? Or is Donald pretty much right on track?

My slides are due Friday, Dec. 21.

Blogs as a Basis for Social Networks

Interesting to see the buzz around Diso.

DiSo (dee • zoh) is an umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of these distributed social networking concepts. or as Chris puts it: “to build a social network with its skin inside out”.

Our first target is Wordpress, bootstrapping on existing work and building out from there.

This aligns pretty well with my experience of Learning and Networking with a Blog. It appears to be heading in a good direction where you can have a distributed understanding of the social graph. While that sounds somewhat like OpenSocial, I'm still not sure that I believe that OpenSocial gets me what I really want/need - interacting with the social graph across sites.

This is also a good direction in that it starts with something that you own as an individual - your blog (as opposed to starting within the walls of Facebook).

Of course, this is early, but the general trend of seeing distributed, open social network solutions is encouraging.

Master's Education Technology or Instructional Design - Which Programs? Why?

I'm hoping people might be able to help a reader who has an inquiry that I really don't know much about...

I've been reading your blog for a while. I've read the an older blog post on Online Master's program's, but I am still quite lost.

I would like to take a two year Master's program in education, education technology, or instructional design. Right now I'm leaning towards the University of Colorado Denver or the San Diego program.

I am a corporate trainer wanting to expand my skills and knowledge to creating interactive training programs (eLearning).

I am wondering if you have any suggestions on which Master program is would provide a solid education on this subject?

I've known several people who went through the San Diego program and were quite good. But other than that, I don't have enough experience with this question to have any real thoughts.

Help?

Visual Thinking - Do You Have Questions?

I've been having a bit of dialog with various folks from the VizThink conference about whether and how much Visual Thinking relates to eLearning. See:

• Crash Course in Visual Thinking
• VizThink and Visual Thinking and Learning - Still Not Sure

for background. These discussions have diverged into a discussion of whether I'd get value personally from the conference given my past challenges with being able to figure out how to create diagrams.

Well Dave Gray has decided to take this on in an online session. You can see more information and sign up by clicking this link: How is Visual Thinking Related to eLearning?

One important note on the description. It implies that I'll be answering questions - actually, I'll be asking questions. Hopefully Dave will be answering.

In fact, if you have questions that you would like to see answered, please let me know.

Best eLearning Blog

The winners of the Edublog awards were announced and I'm happy to report that this blog won for Best eLearning / Corporate Education. I want to thank each of you who voted in support of this blog. Sincerely, thank you!

They've offered an opportunity to submit an "acceptance" but honestly, I'm a bit at a loss on what I should put in an acceptance.

I definitely want to thank everyone who I've had conversations with over the past two years while writing this blog. The conversations have been the value for me and it's been tremendous.

I'd start to name names, but I'd be worried that I would leave people out. And it would take me a few hours to go through and find all the names. Should I just suck it up and do that? Or is there another way to do it? Do you think people would feel slighted if I happen to miss them? Is that worth the risk?

And other than thanking everyone, what else would I put in an acceptance? Anyone? Please help.

Update: Here's what I submitted -

Thank you for the edublog award. I want to especially thank my readers for voting for me, but I really want to thank everyone for all of the conversations we've had over the past two years. I really started my blog with the expectation that it would be similar to speaking engagements. What I've found is that it's a truly extraordinary Learning and Networking Tool. Through blogging, I've accelerated my learning greatly, I've met too many interesting people to possibly name and thank, I've met up with many of them face-to-face at various events, and truly it's become an integral part of my professional life. I look forward to continued conversation about the intersection of technology and learning.

Update: I just saw a post by Clive Shepherd - Edublog Award Winners. He's actually done a nice job on this that I may essentially rip off...

Now, I'm sure no-one starts blogging in order to win awards, although the appreciation of one's peers is always welcome. Looking at other measures of success, I'm probably financially a little worse off after devoting so much time to this blog over the past two years. Luckily there are benefits that far outweigh the costs, not least many new friends in the blogosphere and a hugely enriched understanding of the professional field in which I work. For this reason, I would recommend any other learning and development professionals out there with a story to tell and a willingness to share perspectives with your peer group to take the plunge and join us.

I may skip the financially worse off part. :)