Most successful online conference in ASHA history!

Our online conference for SLP's was a huge success due to the joint efforts of my wonderful collegues and our partnership with icohere.
Overall participant satisfaction with the conference was 4.71 on a 5-point scale—extraordinary!

Looking forward to keeping the momentum going by learning more about great elearning!
The New Generation of e-Learning Delivery webinar next week should provide more insight into our future conferences.
http://www.trainingindustry.com/webinars/3-30-10webinar.aspx

Have a great day!

A Year Worth of Work

On Monday, March 1 a year worth of work comes to fruition. It started with a brainstorming session and has turned into the biggest live online event in ASHA history! I am fortunate to work with a wonderful team of writers, technologists, project managers, graphic artists, content consultants, subject matter experts and vendors. This was a large joint effort.
I'll post updates during the conference so you know how it goes!

Thoughts on Predications for elearning in 2010

Yesterday I listened to Dr. Tony Karrer talk about his top ten predications for elearning in 2010 for a SIG online meeting for the Washington DC chapter of ASTD. Tony also has his predications on his blog at http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/2010/01/top-10-elearning-predictions-for-2010.html
Two of his predications really stood out to me based on my experiences this past year.
I can't tell you how many times I've tried to describe a delivery method (i.e. technology) for an elearning program and said the word "convergenece." It just seems like I begin explaining a feature and realize you can accomplish this in so many different formats. Scenario based learning with interactive feedback can be accomplished online, live or self-study, and on a DVD as well. And you can get that learning experience on your computer, on your set top DVD player and even on your cell phone. It's all merging together. And I agree with Tony it's just going to keep happening.
Social learning is hard to describe to those outside the learning role causing a need to explain it and be very specific in the potential uses you see for your organization. It's not so hard to sell the idea that Social networking is here to stay or that it is a viable avenue to explore. But if you don't specify exactly how you want to use it for learning than you loose the the non-learning professional you are trying to sell the idea to. So I agree with Tony's predication that Social Learning grows but is more specfic.

Thanks for the great seminar Tony!

E-Learning Expectations - Associations Now Magazine - Publications and Resources - ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership

E-Learning Expectations - Associations Now Magazine - Publications and Resources - ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership

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......