April 4, 2008 – Silence and Voice

Jeffrey’s Twitter Updates for 2008-04-04

@BronSt It was a wonderful evening! The best for your remaining time here. Let me know the next time you will be back. #
Half day today at work. Took the afternoon off for some culture. #
Half day today at work. Took the afternoon off for some culture. #
Just started to use SocialThing! Interesting site, though still in rugged beta. Thank you @ChrisRicca for the invite. #

What I Hope to Improve as a Learning Professional

I really like the ASTD Learning Circuits Big Question this month, which is “What would you like to do better as a Learning Professional?”

This hearkens me back to a blog post I wrote yesterday, Whose Objectives Are They, Anyway? I want have better conversations, discussions, buy-in, and agreement of learning objectives between learner and instructional designer / trainer / instructor within higher education.

The current system of instructional designer designing objectives based on a needs analysis that often does not acknowledge direct input from the learners does not respect the experiences and freedom of an adult population. While I follow the ADDIE process in everything I do, as a higher education instructor I create the objectives based on university expectations and often give them to the students without their input and buy-in. Common for higher education, but unaccaptable for adult education that seeks to acknowledge the active role of the learner in the learning process.

So, what do I hope to improve? Collaborative agreement on learning objectives within higher education.

FriendFeed, So Now What?

It seems social network aggregators are becoming all the rage, and why not? Who has the time to visit every site to see what friends / colleagues are doing? Enter–FriendFeed, a service that will track our activities on a variety of the social media sites where we enter information.

OK, I am game, so I signed up. Now, here is the problem as I see it–how do I find and then follow and then track my colleagues and friends? With email alerts? RSS feeds? Suddenly the good idea seems like a lot of work as I have to look for everybody (again). Sorry–don’t trust any of these services to search my contacts and then add them.

For those of you interested, my FriendFeed stream is http://friendfeed.com/jeffreykeefer.

I think I again need some help–has anybody discovered any best practices out there for using this type of service?