The Big 12 is now 10, and the Big 10 is now 12

and the Pac 10 is now 12, and, uh, some of these may be 16 soon, and, whatever blah blah blah.

Anyway, the 12 Courseware Development groups are now 10, due to the elimination of the Twine groups by Evri, and by a lack of response from BrightFuse as to why the CwDev group was eliminated.

If not already a member, please join and participate in one or more of the CwDev groups.

Thanks - Ted

English Only, Please

To everyone:

My apologies to those of you who don't speak English, but due to the proliferation of inappropriate comments posted to this blog in non-English languages, I must enforce an English-only rule.

Thanks for your understanding. Comments are welcome, but please keep them clean and relevant.

Best regards, Ted

IT4ALL

OK, folks, enough with the gloom and doom already...

IT4ALL (Integrating Technology for Active Lifelong Learning) has moved off of Ning (presumably due to pricing issues) and now has its own site! From the About page:

IT4ALL website was established on November 22, 2006 as an open and not-for-profit website. Initially, the site was built around Moodle, a course management system with the name, Integrating Technology: Exploring New Domains (IT-END). On August 2009, IT-END started offering Moodle for Teachers (M4T) workshops and took on a new look and name: Integrating Technology for Active Lifelong Learning (IT4ALL).

Today, IT4ALL Moodle provides free online workshops in professional development, formal and informal education, collaborative instruction and learning, and lifelong learning. The workshops are run by experienced online facilitators who volunteer their services. Access to the pages on IT4ALL Moodle is free and open to all. The site carries no advertising, nor do any of the links to other sites involve sponsorship or payment. The site currently has a one time registration fee of $39 for some of the workshops. However, scholarships are available to anyone who cannot afford the registration fee.

In addition to the IT4ALL Moodle workshops, IT4ALL has expanded and now includes a social network, a IT4ALL Wiki, individual and group mentoring services, web hosting, consultation, and support.

The aim of the the social network is to build a community of learners and educators for the purpose of connecting and engaging people of all cultures in collaborative lifelong learning.

The web hosting is an additional service IT4ALL provides for educators and organizations who wish to create courses using Moodle, Joomla, Forums, Blogs, and MediaWikis. The team at IT4ALL also provide specialized web hosting & installation of VLE, ongoing support and consultation on technology and pedagogy related subjects.

This is a very good social network! For more information, please visit the IT4ALL website. Thanks, Nellie!

BrightFuse

The BrightFuse Courseware Development Group has apparently temporarily disappeared. Note that both the Evri and BrightFuse CwDev links will not work properly until when and if these matters are resolved.

Twine has been absorbed by Evri...

And the twines (semantic networks) created by individuals (such as the Courseware Development Twine) have apparently disappeared. I have a request into Evri to see if this information can be recovered.

Please click this link for more about Evri.

LearnHub --> Nuvvo

Old name: LearnHub

New name: Nuvvo

Please see the Nuvvo site for details. The Courseware Development group link was changed accordingly - see the Group Scoreboard (this group is otherwise unchanged).

I tried hard but...

No WAY could I do better than these!

Latest Courseware Development News

Speak Softly, but Tweet Loudly!

The squeaky tweet gets the grease! After posting a message within the Tweetworks CwDev group that I intended to abolish the group due to lack of interest, I got the following response from Mark Langford, head and founder of Tweetworks:

"Don't go anywhere my friend! The new Tweetworks release is happening very soon."

This kind of personal interest is rare, and appreciated. I did follow up with a request for more information on what is in the new release, and what the advantages are over Twitter lists. However, I thank Mark very much for his response, and the Tweetworks group will continue to exist, hopefully with a lot more members.

More about Mark can be found at this link.

Harsh Realities - Some Groups Will Go Away

To all:

I am happy to report that my "real life" has gotten a lot busier, however, as a result, several inactive Courseware Development groups will be discontinued. By "inactive", I refer both to membership counts and to lack of member posts.

The following groups will go away:

• Konnects
• Xing
• Tweetworks (to be replaced by something else Twitter-oriented)

I want to thank the members of these groups for their participation!

Ted Kopp, Courseware Development Group Manager and Blogger

Graphic Design for the Rest of Us

The situation: Desire to do some graphic design for eLearning and other purposes

The problem: Don't have a lot of spending money - purchased software is muy expensive, especially anything Adobe®

The solution: Free / open source software (what a concept!)

I've been testing out the following, similar to the Adobe product listed first:

Illustrator: Inkscape vector graphics editor

Photoshop: Gimp Gnu image manipulation program

Some of the images I add to this blog in the future will be created and/or modified using one or both of the above.

Try these yourselves and have fun!

Get Spacey!

To all:

The Courseware Development Group has been started on MySpace, one of the original social networks. To join and/or look around, please visit the group at this link. Hope to see many of you there!

Thanks - Ted

Blog Enhancements

To my readers,

I've added a couple of enhancements to this blog:

Quote of the Day, from The Free Dictionary: This is their daily quotation (appears at right of this blog under my LinkedIn Profile). There are other pieces of code on this site that can be added to a website/blog (games, word exercises, etc.) - look under Webmasters for Free Content.

Followers - this blog can now be followed via Google Friend Connect (appears at right of this blog under the Quote of the Day).

Thanks, Manishankar!!

Twitter eLearning List

To all Twitter Users:

Twitter now has lists, which are in effect subgroups of your followers that you set up for a particular reason (and a follower can be assigned to more than one list). Lists can be public (and can be followed as if they are Twitter users themselves), or kept private.

For example - I set up a public list that shows the Tweets of my followers (people and companies) who are interested in eLearning:

@tedkopp/elearning

Please feel free to follow the list and/or me - if you do follow me, and are interested in eLearning, I'll add you to the list!

It's the Latest, it's the Greatest, it's the...

LearningExpress Library! If you are a member of your local public library, you may have free access to LearningExpress. This site has a lot of online training, in diverse subjects such as courses for students (elementary school through college), MS-Office products (2003 and 2007), job search help, even US Citizenship preparation!

One glitch that they are supposedly going to fix - you can't save your place in the MS-Office courses, so you need to keep track of your own progress. Otherwise, these courses seem very comprehensive. If you are doing a computer class, it does help to have access to two computers - one to take the class, one to actually try out what you are learning.

If you've tried a LearningExpress class, please post your thoughts here.

pcLearning4U is Open for Business

To my loyal readers, and anybody else who hath stumbled upon this blog:

As part of my efforts to learn more about learning (and to obtain additional dirty filthy lucre, moolah, dinero, etc.), I have founded pcLearning4U, a new company dedicated to bringing individual personal computer instruction to Richmond, VA people of every age.

Instruction topics include computer basics, introduction to MS-Office products, and uses of social media, among others.

Please visit the pcLearning4U Site for more information. If you are a Facebook user, please also visit our Facebook Fan Page and become a fan!

Thanks - Ted

Jammed Garbage Disposal

You may be asking, what does a jammed garbage disposal have to do with eLearning?

Well, folks, we had just bought a new disposal a couple of years ago, and a narrow glass bottle fell into the darn thang, and it jammed, so instead of calling the plumber (or even the store I bought it from), I consulted the Internet (the "e" part) and Googled "jammed garbage disposal" for solutions (the "Learning" part).

Found this link - this in effect was the courseware. Among other things, I learned that the humming sound was the circuit breaker keeping the motor from overheating - in other words, electricity still flowed into the unit. They then suggested that I turn the central hex opening at the bottom of the unit to manually turn the motor and see if I could loosen the obstruction. Problem - I didn't have the correct size Allen wrench to do this. Solution - I found a sorta L-shaped thingy for a replaceable-head screwdriver that just happened to fit the opening.

So then I started to try to turn the motor, and the dang thing wouldn't budge. Then it budged a little. Then a bit more. Then a bit more as I heard a grinding sound as I turned it - hoping I was grinding the glass piece by hand, rather than stripping the gears. Tried running the disposal - still nothing but a humming sound. Finally, the thingy spun in a complete circle w/ no resistance, turned on the water, turned on the disposal - success! Last but not least, it handled cat food and coffee grounds as good as new.

Lessons learned:

• eLearning is all around you
• Feels good to not have to spend the money to call a repairman!

Domo Schola Doctrina Gratis

Yo, has your favorite blogger gone way around the bend? Heck, no - I just want to call your attention to a very interesting article in Popular Science's September 2009 issue:

Home Schooled - Free University

The author, Josh Dean, attempts to craft his own curriculum based on the online offerings of several universities (including one you may have heard of, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and other sources. He "went" to his "college" for a month.

Among other things, Dean describes MIT's OpenCourseWare program, which offers over 1800 courses online, for free, not for credit. Of course, if you want tangible items, such as textbooks, you have to pay for them. He also describes taking Romanian from a company called Before You Know It and how it won't help him on a future trip to Ecuador, how two college graduates tried to cobble together an "alternative grad school" from MIT's OCW, and his adventures in learning computer languages.

Finally, be sure you read Dean's five Free Online School Rules at the end of the article! Note also that the online version of this article includes links to MIT's OCW, and to nine other sources of free online courses that PopSci likes.

The Malware Warning is GONE

As some of you may know, any attempt to link to this blog during the last week was met with a redirect to a Malware Message page.

After much frustration, including requests for help on Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., it finally dawned on me to do the following:

The malware message page included an option to check a box to proceed anyway, at my own risk. In no way am I recommending that you do so in a similar circumstance (this is completely up to you), however, since I have very good confidence in my security software, I took the chance. Also, the malware was being reported on a linked-to site (blog.designers-x.com), not this site.

I then looked for the offending site, found it on the Blogroll, and removed it from the Blogroll. All is working OK now - yay!

The Group Scoreboard is now also up-to-date.

Thanks for your patience - Ted

P.S. - if any of you know the owners of the designers-x site, please notify them that they have a malware problem.

Blogroll - Keeping it Fresh and Tasty

Hey folks, you don't like stale rolls, do you? I've added a few new entries to the blogroll, including Moodle Tutorials.

Check out the roll, and keep in mind that no butter, cheese, or other fixins are required to enjoy this roll! Also, if you know of other eLearning-related blogs that would be appropriate for the roll, please post them here and/or send me the links.

LinkedIn Courseware Development Subgroups

now has subgroup capability! As a result, I am considering adding some subgroups to the LinkedIn Courseware Development Group.

Please feel free to post any subgroup suggestions here. Thanks for making this group very popular (as of this posting, there are over 700 members)!