Sorry for the delay

Well, it's been some time since we posted something here. We've been busy, busier than we've ever been in our history.

1. We are providing guidance and development for a powerful business in the financial services industry (yes, there are some shining stars out there). They have us analyzing their business processes, documenting them, automating them, and writing the training materials so they can scale their business.

2. We are still engaged with Jones University/NCTI in developing field manuals for the broadband industry. So far, we've covered MPEG and are now finishing up advanced digital devices.

3. Along with NCTI, we've uncovered a big gap in guidance and practice when it comes to the cable industry's roll out of business-grade telephone service. Standard telephone company industry guidelines, designed over the past 50 years to protect both the network and customer equipment are NOT being put into practice. Heck, they are not even known or taught. We are working with the major standards bodies to get everyone talking and implementing best practices to ensure reliability, accuracy, and quality.

4. Our Social Networking guidance is quite popular. We've been invited to talk at a local Rotary club lunch next month. Even with 30 Million people on Linkedin, there is a bit of confusion on how to use it, especially in these tough times.

5. New eLearning applications continue to pop up. TechSmith released Snagit 9 and Camtasia Studio 5. Our initial evaluation of Snagit 9 has us scratching our heads. We like the library approach but miss the speed of 8. Also, 9 has a glitch so that the one-click feature dissapears at random. For now, if you have Snagit 8, wait until the bug are fixed before moving to 0.

6. Illiteracy in the workplace continues to get worse. We are seeing major complaints from new clients who want to lift the professionalism of their workforces. This concern covers emails, general correspondence, report writing, "Death by PowerPoint," reviews, blogs, texting, and other forms of communications. We're working on it but feel it is another result of a permissive approach to managing employees and not following through on managing expectations. We can hold remedial classes all day, but the real answer is can managers really motivate their employees anymore to be the best they can be? We think we know how to help them.

All for now.

Don't have time to read 1000 words? Use TagCrowd

Face it, we are always strapped for time. Today somebody suggested I look into Perceptual Control Theory - PCT says that how we perceive changes to our environment determines our behavior. To get a better idea about PCT I found Dr. Powers' talk about it from 1990. It was quite long and instead of reading through, I copied the text and pasted it into http://www.tagcrowd.com/ the result is shown in the illustration to the left.

teachITnow presented at SFTA event

Last night, about eighty people showed up for our talk on Linkedin and other social networking tools that help to build a brand on the Internet.

With more and more companies trying to understand what it means to be "Web 2.0," last night allowed us to share our experiences in developing our brand.

I would like to acknowledge Jay Berkowitz and his 10 Golden Rules of Internet Marketing, too. Jay spoke at the May event and his suggestions are working for me and teachITnow.

Much of what we presented last night was a result of that investment in time.

I hope this event was valuable to all. At the SFTA we strive to make workshops like this relevant to our membership, so please tell me what else you would like to hear about.

You can download the PowerPoint we used at www.teachitnow.com/SFTA.

It's Monday and we're farming for great links.

We just got this link off of the Teach and Learn Online group on Google. It's worth a look.
http://www.swarthmore.edu/NatSci/cpurrin1/textbookdisclaimers/textbookdisclaimers.pdf

Some groups we suggest include:

Teach and Learn Online (TALO) - Google Groups
trdev - Training and Development - Yahoo Groups
elearningDev - Yahoo Groups

Hot New Links:

Looking for the right video tutorial? Stop searching each video site one at a time. Use this valuable tool from video fetcher.

http://www.videofetcher.com/search_screen.cfm?s=eLearning

While we love LinkedIn for its social networking among professionals, we also like Spoke.com
It is like Hoovers on steroids. You get access to email top leaders of thousands of companies.

www.spoke.com

ASTD Ft. Lauderdale Chapter Meeting
Tonight I met a great crowd of people. I learned a lot from them as my talk on e-Learning unfolded. We had a small intimate discussion about what was going wrong in their attempts to design, develop, and deliver e-Learning. Some shared their own experience in using it effectively. What struck me was that we all still need to keep the conversation rolling along until we understand how to convince our teammates about the value of well-written e-Learning.I promised to provide a link to the PowerPoint slides. Here it is in pdf format. Click here to load in Acrobat Reader or right-click and select target as... to download and save.Thanks again for a great evening!