Collin's Work 2.0 Blog

Life is complicated

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 02:10:00 +0000

To make things even more complicated, this week I announced the OFFICIAL launch of Collin Kromke Photography, serving Sun Prairie and Madison, WI.

http://collinkromke.com

I built the site on the Wordpress blog platform with the Thesis theme, and I'll be blogging there to share photos and stories from my shoots.

Check it out and please keep me in mind if you need photos of your family and/or children.

New Direction?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 03:47:00 +0000

I started a new job in the Digital Marketing department as a Social Media Specialist about a month ago. Obviously I haven't done much with this blog in many months, so now I'm deciding if I want to resurrect it or just let it go and focus on posting at SocialMeteor.com. Any thoughts? I have some ideas, but if you're reading this I'd be interested to hear what you have to say.

photo credit, Phillie Casablanca

President 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 18:39:00 +0000

Whether or not you're a supporter of Predident Elect Barack Obama, you've got to love the fact that he's delivering weekly addresses via YouTube. This guy gets it, and I'm certain that he's going to miss his BlackBerry.

Here's his first address from November 15th:

You know you've been busy at work when...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 03:20:00 +0000

...you haven't updated your blog in 2 weeks!

This has been a busy place with lots of work and tight deadlines, so there just hasn't been time for any updates. I'll try to get something posted before this time next week if possible. I have a bunch of weekly drafts from the Work Literacy course that I still need to edit and post, and this week I've been trying to stay caught up with the Corporate Learning Trends & Innovations Conference (http://learntrends.ning.com and http://www.learntrends.com) by viewing the recordings at home in the evening.

I also started a Ning community in my department this week, so hopefully I'll have something to report about that soon. Right now, I'm just trying to get people to register and explore, but there seems to be some resistance. Or maybe everybody's just busy like me, and not so willing to do the fun stuff like blogging and networking at home in the evening.

eLearning Learning Site Launch

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 17:03:00 +0000

I am honored to be "featured" in Tony Karrer's re-branded eLearning Learning site. As he described it to me, this is a hub where he will pull together content from various members of the eLearning world and make it more easily accessible to people who are searching and/or who want to stay up to date, but who don't use an RSS reader (or want someone to help filter).

I have added a widget to my sidebar (scroll down to eLearning Learning Labels on the right side of the page) that automatically searches all my posts for certain keywords/tags/labels. If you click on a label in that list you will go to the eLearning Learning site where you will see all of my posts on that topic followed by posts from the other featured bloggers. For example, if you click the Wiki label in that list, it will take you here: http://www.elearninglearning.com/wiki/&source=work-2.0-blog. Check it out!

I used Tony's BrowseMyStuff site fairly frequently before this re-branding, and I found it to be an invaluable resource. Poke around when you have some time and I'm sure you'll find something you can use.

Big Question

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 22:51:00 +0000

I was very excited to find that my "Opportunity Knocks" question from 10/14/08 (see below) was the basis for The Big Question for November on Network Feedback on the Learning Circuits Blog?

Thanks for the mention, Tony! I'll be watching the replies to this month's question very closely.

Week 2 - Web 2.0 for Learning Professionals

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 03:01:00 +0000

Now that Week 3 is almost over, I should probably post my Week 2 summary! Oops!

The focus of this weeks Work Literacy - Web 2.0 for Learning Professionals course was on Social Bookmarking--Delicious and Diigo. I had already been using Delicious for a while, but upon discovering Diigo I've decided to switch. Actually, I'm still using both, but I'm focusing on using Diigo for my professional bookmarks and Delicious for all of my bookmarks, including the personal ones... I think. I'm still trying to wrap my brain around the best use of both of them. All I've done so far is bookmark (with tags) all websites/blogs/tools that I find interesting or that might be useful in my research of Web 2.0 tools for work. This should make it easier for me to find them again later.

Diigo has more of a community feel to me, but Delicious is still the more popular and "accepted" site as far as I can tell. However, Diigo does have some features that I like that aren't available on Delicious, primarily highlighting and commenting on bookmarked pages. I also like that I can set up my Diigo bookmarks to feed automatically into Delicious, so I really only have to bookmark pages once (both public and private) in Diigo and they show up on both sites.

For the class, people were tagging their bookmarks with wlning on Delicious. Check out the list here: http://delicious.com/tag/wlning.

Tagging bookmarks certainly has a use in training. For example, if I was teaching people about blogging I could create a special tag for the class such as AmFamBlogging, and any time someone found an interesting article on blogging they could bookmark it and tag it appropriately, basically sharing their knowledge with others who attended the class and who might attend the class in the future. This could also be useful for bookmarking competitor or industry information to be shared with others in the company.

Another use might be to use the "network" feature on Delicious in order to view the tags of an "expert" in a field. As an example, if you thought I was an expert on Web 2.0, you could see everything I've tagged web2.0 on Delicious here: http://delicious.com/collin.k/web2.0. Here's that same list in my Diigo account: http://www.diigo.com/user/collin_k/web2.0.

So many ideas, so little time!

The topic for Week 3 is blogs. Looks like I may be a little ahead of the curve on that one.

Opportunity Knocks - Input Needed

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 14:47:00 +0000

I've received a request, and I'm hoping my readers can help me come up with some ideas for a solution.

A colleague is developing a training program on an application roll-out that will be delivered in a traditional classroom setting. Inevitably, questions will be asked during the classes where the instructor doesn't know the answers. Traditionally, our instructors use a "parking lot", capturing those questions on an easel pad. Subject matter experts are consulted by phone or email, either during classroom breaks or immediately following the class. When the answers come in after class, the instructor usually emails them to the participants.

There HAS to be a better way!

Remember, I work for a very conservative insurance company, though I do have some leeway to be innovative. Privacy is an issue, and we prefer that the questions and answers only be seen by people inside the company. It would also be beneficial if screen-shots of the application could be posted if necessary to answer the questions.

We don't have any internal solutions for blogs, forums, wikis, etc. Assume that anything we use either has to be installed on a web server (which would be very prohibitive due to I/T constraints), or has to be available on the web. I have Dreamweaver and Captivate available for development of a web solution behind our firewall.

I'm registered at Yammer and QikCom, and I think either of them could work (except for the screen-shots). Of course, I was the first person in the company to register at both of them, and only 3 others have followed me to Yammer!

Ning could work too, but that might be over-doing it for this request.

Is there a way to do this with a blog, an RSS feed, and something like PageFlakes or NetVibes?

What about a wiki at a place like Google Sites?

I'm open to discussing any and all suggestions. Please post a reply with your thoughts.

Week 1 - Web 2.0 for Learning Professionals

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 04:17:00 +0000

I just spent about an 90 minutes working on the Week 1 coursework for the Work Literacy - Web 2.0 for Learning Professionals course. The focus this week is on Social Networking--Ning, LinkedIn and Facebook. I've been exploring all 3 sites for quite a while, and as far as usefulness in my work as a Curriculum Designer, I'd rank them as follows:

Ning
LinkedIn
Facebook

I can see a lot of potential in Ning because it's a place to promote community and social networking, and it incorporates blogs, discussion forums, videos, etc.

LinkedIn is more of an online resume in my mind, though there is much more to it that I still need to explore such as groups, recommendations, etc.

Facebook doesn't seem to provide a lot of value professionally, but I'm open-minded and welcome any ideas that people may have regarding how to use it in a business and training environment.

I'll continue to engage in the Week 1 conversations and see where it takes me. So far, I really like the design of the course and I'm certain I'll learn a lot of useful information as I move forward with developing a business case for how we can use Web 2.0/Learning 2.0 technologies in our team/department/division/company.

Tom Peters: "Blogging has changed my life."

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 01:11:00 +0000

I'm a huge Tom Peters fan, and I love this interview clip with him from the Inc. 5000 conference in Washington DC on September 19, 2008.

Not Connecting with Connectivism

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 01:18:00 +0000

I guess it was wishful thinking to think that I'd actually have time to dive into the Connectivism class without having to do all the work at home. I haven't had time there either, so now I'm over two weeks behind on the "work" part of the class, although I've been keeping up fairly regularly with the discussions on the Moodle forum and on Twitter. I just haven't been contributing or keeping up with any of the readings, live webinars, etc. There is a tremendous amount of information flowing through the course, but so far it all seems very disjointed to me, so I'm just not sure where to jump in and how to organize everything for myself. I suppose that's one of the lessons I'm supposed to learn.

To make matters worse, something new has come up, and I'm like a kid in a candy store - show me something more colorful, sweeter, and a little fresher and I'll change directions in a heartbeat.Here's a link to what I'm talking about, and since it seems more organized and on topic, I'll probably mostly abandon the Connectivism course and focus on this one for 6 weeks:

Free - Web 2.0 for Learning Professionals

Is there such a thing as adult ADD???

Don't answer that.

Yammer Presentation Video from TC50

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 02:19:00 +0000

Here's the presentation that the people from Yammer did at TechCrunch50. It's only 9 minutes long, and very interesting.

It should also come as no surprise that Yammer took the top prize at TechCrunch50. Hate to say I told you so!

Jason Calcanis posted this in Twitter today:

I think when folks get 10 people from their company into Yammer they will see the huge impact it will have.

I believe it's true. I'm the first user on the AmFam Yammer network. (Is there an Early Adopter award?). Now I just need to figure out the best way to get the word out and to get people to at least try it out.

Mark My Words

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 13:39:00 +0000

If you haven't heard it somewhere else, then you heard it first - Yammer is going to be HUGE. It is a private Twitter-like application only for employees of a specific company that was introduced yesterday at TechCrunch50.

Here's a nice concise description of the company from CrunchBase:

Yammer is a tool for making companies and organizations more productive through the exchange of short frequent answers to one simple question: “What are you working on?”

As employees answer that question, a feed is created in one central location enabling co-workers to discuss ideas, post news, ask questions, and share links and other information. Yammer also serves as a company directory in which every employee has a profile and as a knowledge base where past conversations can be easily accessed and referenced.

Anyone in a company can start their Yammer network and begin inviting colleagues. The privacy of each network is ensured by limiting access to those with a valid company email address. The basic Yammer service is free. Companies can pay to claim and administer their networks.

Connectivism course blog

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 00:53:00 +0000

I'm considering participating in the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge Online Course.

Here's the course description from the course wiki:

Connectivism and Connective Knowledge is a twelve week course that will explore the concepts of connectivism and connective knowledge and explore their application as a framework for theories of teaching and learning. It will outline a connectivist understanding of educational systems of the future. This course will help participants make sense of the transformative impact of technology in teaching and learning over the last decade. The voices calling for reform do so from many perspectives, with some suggesting 'new learners' require different learning models, others suggesting reform is needed due to globalization and increased competition, and still others suggesting technology is the salvation for the shortfalls evident in the system today. While each of these views tell us about the need for change, they overlook the primary reasons why change is required.

Should be interesting, exciting, and enlightening. Hopefully I'll be able to find the time to keep up.

Progressive is... well... PROGRESSIVE

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 16:42:00 +0000

I have to say that I'm impressed with what Progressive is doing with their customer education. For example, check out this Understanding Insurance blog post:

http://www.progressive.com/understanding-insurance/whose-car-should-your-kids-drive.aspx

I'll admit it. I've subscribed to the feed with my Google Reader, and they've made it easy to share, blog and subscribe by including all the necessary button links (scroll down to the "Should You Update Your Policy?" section of the article to see what I'm talking about).

They even have a "channel guide" that lists all RSS feeds available for the Progressive Newsroom, ProgressiveResponds.com, blogs and more.

http://www.progressive.com/channel-guide.aspx

Day 2 Data Dump

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 20:47:00 +0000

It's been 2 weeks since I attended this workshop, so I should probably do my "data dump" from day 2!

As I stated earlier, I saved about 35 web links during the 2nd day of the workshop, so the speed of the information being thrown at us wasn't any slower than the first day.

We had an interesting discussion about Creative Commons Licenses, which has to do with copyright for all kinds of things such as images. For example, if you look at the image I posted earlier called "Social Media Landscape", you'll notice the Creative Commons License in the lower left corner of the image, indicating "Some Rights Reserved" and an "Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike" license, meaning that anyone is free to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work as long as they attribute it to the author, don't use it for commercial purposes, and share it only under the same license. We discussed whether the eLearning Guild's use of the image in the workshop would be considered "commercial" because they are making money on the workshop. Through further exploration of the Creative Commons website, we discovered that Commercial seems to be interpreted to mean selling the image, which the Guild clearly wasn't doing. With the availability of so many images on Flickr and their use of Creative Commons Licenses, it's certainly worth learning more about this if we wish to use images found on that site and others.

At one point during the workshop, the instructors made PC to PC phone calls via Skype (blocked at AmFam) to Eric Hunter, an e-learning designer at Ebay, and Brandon Carson, the Chief Instructional Designer at Sun Microsystems. They told us a bit about what they do and allowed us to ask them questions. What was fascinating was that they were at their desks at work and we were able to talk to them live on the "phone" which could be put through the PC speakers because Skype is a VOIP program that's installed on a PC. This is something that could be very useful if AmFam would open up the use of the site rather than blocking it.

When we got to the topic of Wikis, I found this image to be very powerful. (Click the image to see a larger version.)

It explains with a simple image something I've never quite been able to explain in words, and that is that online collaboration is much simpler using a Wiki than it is using email. With a Wiki, everyone is writing and editing the same document, there is a revision history, the ability to track changes, and the ability to have an online discussion without changing the content of the document. For creating Wikis, we talked only very briefly about pbwiki (online) and MediaWiki (downloadable - same platform used by Wikipedia). With most Wikis, there is a learning curve because the writing and editing have to follow a syntax that's kind of learning the basics of HTML, however there are Wiki applications out there that utilize a more WYSIWYG interface, so I'll be on the lookout for one of them. The one we use at AmFam (JSPWiki) is painful to use, and I/S doesn't really want us using it.

In my earlier summary post for day 1 of the workshop, I mentioned delicious.com. Here's an excellent video that explains social bookmarking in plain english. I think you'll find it enlightening.

During the workshop, a lot of attendees were asking how we could keep in touch using Web 2.0 technologies rather than exchanging email addresses. Things got really cool when one of the instructors set up a social network for us on ning.com. You can see our social network here - http://sss2008.ning.com/. This gave me ideas right away for uses within the Education Division. For example, Tom Vitale and Jennifer Viaene were involved in teaching the Transition to Management program. They also used WebEx for 30-60-90 day follow up sessions. I talked to one of the participants from that program and asked him "What now? How do you keep in touch now that the program is over?" He said email and phone are his only options. I believe a site like ning.com would be tremendously useful for a group like his. It allows each person to have their own blog-like page, it has a discussion forum, etc. It's a great way to maintain the communities of practice that we start when we bring people into our classes.

As I was posting short updates on Twitter during the conference, I posted the following at one point: "I'm not sure how we could use this in education, but Evernote is VERY COOL. I need a cell phone with a camera now." The instructor did a demonstration showing us how doing a search in Evernote not only searches through the text in any documents you've saved, but also uses text recognition to find the text in any photos or screen shots you've saved. Check it out. It really is an amazing service and one that I will begin using soon for some personal things.

At one point, the instructors demonstrated the Web Clips widget in the Google Desktop application (blocked by AmFam for some reason) that allows RSS feeds to be delivered right to your PC's desktop. I would love figure out how we can use RSS feeds to deliver small chunks of content right to a user's desktop.

I posted a question in Twitter: "How do we track Learning 2.0 in the LMS??? Is it even important to do so? Is credit necessary for reading 1-2 paragraphs of content?" We talked about this in the workshop. In our AmFam corporate culture, a lot of value has been placed on tracking the completion of a class in your learning plan. Learning just for the sake of learning, which is my philosophy, doesn't seem to be valued as much, so there may be some concern about getting "credit" for learning something.

Another cool site we talked about was Jott.com. I've been testing this site for posting to this blog and to my Twitter, and it has the potential to be very useful. Unfortunately, they are now moving out of beta and will begin charging soon for anything more than the basic services. What is Jott, you ask? Well, check out this Twitter post for one example. I was sitting in my director's office demonstrating some of the things I learned in this workshop. I called Jott from my cell phone, left a brief message, and directed it to post to my Twitter stream. As you can see, my message was transcribed and posted with a link to the actual audio of my phone call. The basic Jott service only allows a 15 second message, so this functionality is mostly useful for Twitter posting when you are away from a PC or web enabled cell phone.

Some other sites I'd like to look into when I have some time (and a short description of each from their website):

udutu - easy-to-use online learning authoring software that allows you to build your course very quickly no matter where you are, and no matter who you need to involve.

moodle - Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities.

37signals - developer and provider of business and personal productivity web applications.

SocialText - developer of business social software and wikis for rapid team communications, knowledge sharing, flexible collaboration, and dynamic social networks.

LearnhHub - social learning network where people teach & learn online.

MIT OpenCourseWare - makes the course materials that are used in the teaching of almost all MIT’s undergraduate and graduate subjects available on the Web, free of charge, to any user anywhere in the world.

Next step - figuring out where to start with (a) getting this information out to others in the department and the division, and (b) implementing some of these tools into my development work.

So here I sit talking...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 20:49:00 +0000

So here I sit talking into my cell phone, wondering if it's true. Can I really post to my blog from Jott? If you can see this, it worked. listen

Powered by Jott

Link Overload?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 20:56:00 +0000

I saved 40 links to various websites yesterday and another 35 today. Simply an amazing amount of information being shared in this workshop. It will take me a while to process all of this.

It's EASY!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 13:32:00 +0000

Blogging is so easy that I can even post to my blog via email. I just happen to be sending this one from my Blackberry. (I can also post to Twitter from my Blackberry.)

Sent from my BlackBerry

LOTS of Information

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 03:39:00 +0000

All I can say after day 1 of the workshop is WOW! There was a LOT of information shared today, and a lot of good ideas flowing through the room. The presenters are VERY knowledgeable and experienced with Web 2.0 technologies, and it felt like they shared everything they know.

The day started with an introduction to feed readers such as the Google Reader and the concept of RSS feeds. I've been using Google Reader to read blogs for a couple of years now, so I was already pretty familiar with the information presented.

We also talked about "web desktop" apps, which are basically applications that allow you to have a desktop environment embedded in a browser. This was a new concept for me, and we looked at Pageflakes, Netvibes and iGoogle. I like the idea, but I'll need to do some more research and experimentation with those tools to get a better idea of how we might apply them in to corporate education.

One tool I found to be very interesting was delicious.com. This is what is called social bookmarking, which means you can save all your bookmarks online, share them with other people, and see what other people are bookmarking. Delicious keeps all your bookmarks in one place so you will never lose track of your bookmarks again. Since they store your bookmarks online, you can get to them from any computer, whether you're at home, at work or on the road. Most social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags instead of the traditional browser-based system of folders. They also enable viewing bookmarks associated with a chosen tag, and include information about the number of users who have bookmarked them.

We practiced using delicious.com throughout the day, saving bookmarks that were shared in the workshop and tagging them SSS08 (an abbreviation for Summer Seminar Series 2008). Check out our ongoing list here: http://delicious.com/tag/sss08.

I can see a some applications for this. For example, following a class on a specific leadership topic, we could assign a unique tag such as AFLead08 an ask the participants to use delicious.com to save and tag any bookmarks they find on that topic with the AFLead08 tag. A developer could use those tagged sites for future revisions of the course, or an instructor could use them in a future class on the same topic.

We also talked quite a bit about blogging, which you are viewing an example of right now. There are endless possibilities for blogging in our environment, such as what I'm doing by sharing what I've learned in a workshop for others to read. A blog can also be used to share interesting and applicable YouTube videos, such as this one that we watched today:

The blog application of choice today was Blogger, and several people worked together and found out how simple it is to create and maintain a blog on the web.

While those people were creating blogs, another group was creating wikis using another free site - pbwiki.com. I spent my time working with a group that was exploring web desktop applications since I was already familiar with blogs and wikis.

Regarding blogs and wikis, we had a lengthy discussion about control:

What if people say bad things?
what if people say wrong things?
What if people say secret things?

On the flip side, we talked about:

What if they don't?
What if they collaborate and share?
What if they find new business?
What if they share best practices?

The presenters felt that control is really a training issue. When teaching people to use these technologies, we would have to teach them what's right and wrong just like we do about issues of race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. I thought the discussion made a lot of sense.

To summarize, there are countless tools out there, and as an organization we have a lot to learn. We talked a little about other social media applications such as LinkedIn and Facebook, both of which I've been getting familiar with recently. There are MANY, MANY more. Click the following image for a visual representations of some things we talked about today:

Tomorrow, I'm looking forward to talking about twitter and lots of other applications that could be useful. Stay tuned...

Funny!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 20:33:00 +0000

A funny cartoon that seems relevant today...

eLearning Guild Summer Seminar Series

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 02:31:00 +0000

I'm in Chicago through Tuesday for the eLearning Guild's Summer Seminar Series. More specifically, I'm attending the Collaborative Learning workshop. As described on the Guild's website:

Join Mark Oehlert and Brent Schlenker for a comprehensive look at Web2.0 technologies impacting the learning landscape of YOUR organization. And it WILL impact your organization. This not a question of “IF” but of “WHEN.” The influx of technologies like blogs, wikis, and RSS into the enterprise is a trickle that will grow into a flood in the coming year. Other “2.0” pieces like social bookmarking, tagging and enterprise-level Mashups are changing the way learning organizations think about their learning solutions, development processes, delivery methods, and adding value to their customers. The real hard part is that most of the challenges here are cultural and not technological.

Considering the topic, it seems like a good idea for me to blog about what I'm learning, possibly during the day since we were encouraged to bring our laptops, but certainly at the end of each day back at the hotel.

I'll also be trying to use Twitter to post short "microblog" updates throughout each day, either from my laptop or from my Blackberry. You can either follow me on Twitter, or you can see the most recent 15 tweets on the right side of this page.

Feel free to post your comments by clicking the "comments" link below.