Challenging 2009!

It is the time year when year end accomplishments are on our mind. This was a challenging year of heavy workloads, watching pennies and closely monitoring sales at ASHA. Being part of the recession in an association environment has been a interesting endeavor. We antcipated a defeciet budget and planned on making it using our reserves. But we actually are almost to the break even level and the last ten days of the year are actually usually very high in terms of sales. So we could actually end the year in the black! Strategies involved watching every penny you spend even on things post-its and pencils. If it could wait till 2010 then wait. If you think you could do it yourself and not use a vendor then try it. This worked for almost everything this year and it paid off!

Cool Introduction to the ISD process

Edutainment Media has a really interesting intro that explains their company's purpose and the ISD process at the same time.

Twitter, Facebook, Yammer, LinkedIn Oh My

I've been experiementing with all these social networking tools over the past few months.
I'm still not sure if they have actually helped in my personal and professional development but they sure are fun and time consuming. I created a twitter account so I could tweat during several training sessions I've been taking on iCohere platform. I found it intriguing to type my ideas and read those of others while taking the online sessions. But I haven't really gone back to the ideas for any real purpose yet. Will I? I don't know. I do check the account to see what others are posting and have found some interesting information and somewhat relevant to my profession but again time consuming.
Yammer is the platform we are using at work for internal social networking and again I find out it intriguing yet distracting at the same time and having messages sent to my email box was a big mistake as I get way too many already. This became something I rarely use fairly quickly.
LinkedIn groups are great. Lots of relevant discussion to follow and a great networking tool.
Facebook has been a purely personal investigation. I'm not using this for professional purposes at all and yet it fullfills a missing part of my life--socialization friends and family that I hardly ever find time to see. It has been a great way to connect and stay connected and believe it or not it makes our face to face meetings more enjoyable because we already know the basics of everyones day to day lives.
Finding a balance for the right amount of time to spend reviewing and contributing to these social networking tools is challenging. Finding value in the tools is easy. Finding an effective way to use the tools is not so easy.
More to come......

Color Theory

Investigating color theory to help inspire new color palette for elearning course I'm working on.

Best Practices in Certification Training

Great article in Training Industry Quarterly

ISD principles for a dry technical topic

I am working on a web program which discusses the anatomy of swallowing and how it applies to a clinical or instrumental exam. It has been a challenge not to make the program feel like the reading of a text book. Weaving pratical information throughout has been critical. But I'm thinking that some sort of interesting cartoon narrative throughout might make this dry topic a little more entertaining.

Computer Musuem

If you are interested in the history of computers you should check out the Computer Musuem that System Source has started. The company is located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and provides great AV Presentation services as well.
Enjoy!