Melissa Pierce, tagged me in a rotating blog meme that states I need to outline 7 random/odd things about me. I’d just like to state for the record that it is incredibly difficult to come up with new and original random/odd facts about me when I’ve already listed out so many here. Having posted that, the following fulfills my obligation to the meme deities…

1. Apparently, I snore insanely and irritatingly loud.
2. Everything I know about how to relate to people (and, in a similar vein, acting) I learned from participating in ComedySportz starting in my sophomore year of high school. Prior to that, I had a very difficult time making friends and small talk. Not that I’m a genius now, but you can only imagine how bad I used to be. ComedySportz sparked a love of performing so much that if I had the financial means to not work for a couple of years, I would enroll in Second City and pursue being a sketch comedian.
3. Logan is named after Wolverine. Her sister, Evie, was not named after the heroine in V for Vendetta, but I’ll run with it because it backs up my geek cred.
4. I taught myself Flash before I learned one lick of HTML and JavaScript.
5. I cry at movies like all the damn time. I’m a sucker for melodrama. I hate myself for doing it; recognize I’m doing it when I’m doing it but I can’t stop myself.
6. Guitar Hero aside, I really suck at video games. Almost as much as I suck at physical competition.
7. I have a tattoo of the Rebel Alliance symbol on my right shoulder. What most people don’t know is that it ALMOST was the logo for Van Halen. Suzy put her foot down on that idea, and we are both much happier because of it.

I tag:

• Brian Dusablon
• Will Hare
• Kevin Reed
• Elliot Cobb
• Jim Behymer
• Scott Davis
• Judy Coposky

The Rules:

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post - some random, some weird.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

A friend emailed me this morning asking how I go about blogging as a Mac user, and how I manage the buzz between Twitter and Facebook.

My workflow for blogging uses these tools, not necessarily all together:

1. Wordpress
2. MarsEdit
3. WordPress for iPhone
4. ScribeFire (for Firefox)

Wordpress is the web application running on PHP/MySQL that I use to actually host the blog. I self-host my sites, but there are a lot of people that use Wordpress.com to host their blogs. Regardless, it’s exactly the same engine. It’s a) free and open-source software; b) elegant and beautifully designed for users to spend more time writing and less time maintaining; c) boasting a huge community of theme designers and plugin authors that morph the blogging tool into a full fledged CMS, CRM and even a social network (if they’re using the WordPress Multi-User Server — also free). Wordpress even supports Google Gears, so you can use it to author offline and then sync up when you’re connected again. It is my primary authoring tool.

MarsEdit is a plain-text editor for blogging. It works with Blogger, MovableType (and its hosted solution, TypePad) and WordPress among a few others. I bought it a while ago and honestly, I don’t use it as much as I used to since Wordpress’ own authoring functions have matured so much, but now and again I use it to write really long and involved posts that will need to contain a lot of media that I need to create to illustrate a point.

I infrequently blog little missives from the iPhone (though a lot less of that now that I have found my outlet with Twitter). When I do, I use Wordpress for iPhone and I can take pictures and post to the blog from the app. The next version is important and I’ll use it more often, as I’ll be able to moderate and respond to comments on my blogs — and the app supports multiple Wordpress blogs (either self-hosted or on Wordpress.com). There’s a possibility that the next version of the app will allow you to pretty much completely admin the blogs, and that would be pretty huge for me now that I can install themes and plugins from my own site.

Now, the tool I probably use most when I’m at work is ScribeFire , which is a plugin for Firefox. If Firefox is your browser of choice, it’s a great plugin and has some nice shortcuts like creating links with the url you’ve already copied onto your clipboard when you want to create a link. Firefox works dog slow on my Mac and it’s a drain even on my PC, so I waver on using it a lot, but if you’re using Firefox, you can’t beat the price

Now as far as Twitter/Facebook updates — Tom King and Mark Oehlert have wavered a bit on linking the two together, but the common way of doing it is to post to Twitter and it relays original tweets (not @ replies or d messages) to your Facebook status. There’s a Facebook app to accomplish this and that’s what I do . Tom and Mark argue, and have a valid point, that the two are distinct audiences and the Facebook crowd often gets left out of the context with which you’d post to Twitter. I try to write for both, and let the chips fall where they may in Facebook — most of my Facebook contacts are non-geeks and they’re overwhelmed with the amount of status updates I have — they think I’m always on Facebook.

I have not tried Pinger. I’ve been using Fring… but PInger looks a lot prettier. Fring supports skype, though, which is pretty nifty if you have WiFi on you can even call over Skype, which is pretty cool.

For monitoring the buzz, especially on Twitter, I use Tweetie. I’ll check out Pinger, but I have some trouble with filtering when everything is in one big clump, like it is with Fring. Tweetie is fast and convenient, and the Facebook app for iPhone is pretty good at being able to respond now to most posts or comments I receive — I set up SMS alerts for wall updates and comments in Facebook, since I have unlimited SMS. Which is important when people are making that timely and mission critical comment on my picture of my Mii and my Wii code. It’s crunch times like that when I can’t reply fast enough.

I’ve also set up a Google alert for @mrch0mp3rs, which lets me know once a day where I get cited (even outside of Twitter, which I do and has happened to me).

After replying the above advice to my friend, Tom followed up recommending ecto, which I’m using to write this post and I have to say, I’m REALLY impressed. I may do a lot more blogging with ecto. Tom also recommends iBlogger over Wordpress for iPhone, and since Illuminex makes both ecto AND iBlogger, I’ll have to give it a try, too.

The thing about being a geek, is that you can never REALLY cement your workflow. It’s constantly in Beta.

1. Why am I good at keeping friends but bad at starting businesses with partners? I’ve been married for over twelve years and we still love each other.  I’ve moved several times across the country with my expanding family and I’ve been able to hold onto friends from everywhere I’ve lived and worked.  We talk/IM/email/tweet almost every day.  I’m even finding friends from the long long ago when there was no Internet to speak of.  I’m an a**hole, but the evidence clearly demonstrates that I’m the kind of a**hole that has a lot of real friends with high tolerances for a**holes.  That said, two times now, I’ve tried to start a business venture with former co-workers (who were also friends), and it hasn’t worked out.  The first time was like six years ago, and the chips were stacked against us with everyone physically moving so far away from each other, and I went passive aggressive in trying to deal with the frustration (mea culpa).  I thought I learned from that experience, but I guess there’s something more for me to learn as my new consulting business went from a partnership to a solo effort barely a month after launching.  So in 2009 I’ll continue to be a company of one.  I still love the idea of partnering in business — maybe not with former co-workers?  It seems to fly contrary to logic…
2. What the hell happened with Rhymefest’s second album, “El Che?” It was supposed to drop in April of 2008.  The Michael Jackson tribute “Man in the Mirror” was so fantastic, I was really looking forward to it — and the album never came out with no news (not even news on MySpace) as to why it was delayed.
3. Why is so much E-Learning content done in Flash if there’s no Flash “coolness” going on? Don’t get me wrong, the more maintenance on your old courses are chores and pain spots, the more sidework I’m going to get updating it and converting it to SCORM or AICC — but if a page-turner is a page-turner, there’s a lot of easier (and cheaper) ways of creating E-Learning content than putting it all in Flash.  This is a topic I hope to explore with Learning Ninjas in 2009 (more to come on that).
4. Why is growing old so painful? Seriously, this tendonitis I have?  Everytime there’s precipitation this last month (and there’s been a lot), my left leg/foot and back hurt like hell.  I could accept it, I guess, if I was some kind of athlete with a storied career that was hard on my joints or whatever — but I’m a nerd whose joints for the most part have been mostly guarded from anything that might cause them stress or harm.
5. How many life and career coaches does the Internet need? It seems like I get followed each week by a new career coach (on Twitter).  Some punk just out of college is going to coach me on my career?  Really?  Try having a career (or 3) first before imparting me with all the wisdom from your BA in English (note:  not ranking on English majors — I’m married to one).  I know of one career coach who’s doing “something” (that’s you, @melissapierce) and she’s not even trying to coach me.

Technorati Tags: twitter, life coach, career coach, tendonitis, pain, growing older, e-learning, flash, page-turner, scorm, aicc, learning ninas, consulting, sidework, business, partnering, partnerships, friends, relationships, rant, opinion, 2008, 2009

Lately, I’ve been reflecting in my head as opposed to on the blog, but I’d like to take a moment to remark on exactly how amazing things are.  Not that we don’t have tons of challenges to champion, and shit to do:  but just to take notice of what we’re able to do in the world we’re living in.

I have a phone that I walk around with in my pants pocket.  10 years ago, this was a luxury that cost beyond ten times what I have affordable to me now, and it was at five times as expensive.  18 years ago, I was a senior in high school and this was still pretty much science fiction.  

The interface on my iPhone is something out of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  It’s now rumored to be available at Walmart for $99.  The special effects (CGI) that were used to fake it on the tv series cost thousands.  You can have it in your pocket for peanuts, by comparison.

13 years ago, it cost me $30 a month for something like five hours of Internet use A MONTH.  To go over was something like $.30 a minute at 14.4kbps.  My phone, even at what we think of as crappy EDGE speeds talks to SPACE (as Louis C.K. puts it) and it’s unbelievably more powerful, smaller, faster and cheaper than how i connected to MUDs back in 1995 — and I am online all the time… on my phone… which, as stated here talks to space, even as it sits in my pocket.

And that device connects me to more people than it would as just a phone.  I probably spend more time on my phone on Twitter than doing anything else.

Social networking is a practice, not a technology.  But thanks to Social Networking technology, I’ve discovered brand new kinships (@moehlert, @briandusablon, @pipwerks, @nudoru) — real emerging friendships that span beyond the shared tech.  I’ve rediscovered and been able to develop abiding respect and collaborations with people (@mobilemind, @jpcampbell) that were professional acquaintences for years, but somehow we never “connected” until we discovered each other virtually.  And then this very week, I found a friend who moved away when I was about six years-old — through Facebook.  He is a person I’ve not quite stalked online, but when I’ve been in the mindset to search for people, his would be the first name I’d look for — and we’re talking maybe 12 of my 35 years — for the one kid I’d share my action figures with — almost three decades ago.  10 years ago, reconnecting would require private investigation and it would be something akin to stalking.  30 years ago it was barely a reverie.  Today, it’s a sleepless early morning with a five month-old crying, and I was too tired/bored to do anything more productive than to search Facebook… and become just inexplicably happy.

And his response when I “friended” him on Facebook?

 ”Glad you found *me*! Do you know how many Aaron Silvers there are??”

I guess he had been looking, too.

So, we live in a period of time where the economy around the world is slowing at a hyperbolic pace, while the violence, strife and famine around the world is now globally felt — not just pictures and Sally Struthers commercials anymore.  There are technologies and capabilities that allow scary, dangerous people to organize and carry out unbelievable acts of destruction, chaos and horror.  They can coordinate with smartphones just like mine and yours.

And/or at the very same time we can connect.  We can share.  We can forge new and incredibly complex relationships.  We can reconnect with people whom you would never expect to see again in a lifetime.  

Family, friends, regular readers or followers would label me correctly as an optimist (maybe even a dreamer), but I’m not one to just gush unabashedly.  So, it is strange for me to feel beyond just geeked-out and just plain ol’ “happy.”

I found my friend.  And inside me, the little kid whose friend moved away pretty much the whole of my life ago is pretty happy.  It’s probably weird.  It *sounds* weird to me.  It sounds like the kind of thing for which I normally rank on people (namely Facebook users).  So color me hypocrite.

And the thing that really gets me (and gets me really geeked out) is this:  my daughters are BORN with this world.  They didn’t have to learn it or build up to this point.  They already have it to start out.

I wonder what they’ll build it up to…

Avron Barr asked members of LETSI to do some reality checking for him.  He listed reasons (whether they’re a collective list or his own reasons, I can’t attribute) for moving beyond the SCORM as a reference model and using only accredited standards to a technology platform (remember: Linux for Learning) using informal standards and open source implementations.

 

• This is established industry practice, e.g., W3C, in situations of accelerated technology and business innovation.
• Group consensus, self-governance, and transparency allows more rapid innovation while maintaining interoperability where possible
• Sharing base code supports more consistent and less costly 
• Lowers barriers to entry for innovative products, even more than standards themselves 
• Supports architectural modularity and service-oriented infrastructure, which in turn supports product and market 
• Dramatically reduces total community investment in software tools and infrastructure

 

I may be wrong, but I don’t recall Unix being an ISO or IEEE standard when Linus Torvalds was developing Linux in his pajama pants.  Maybe it was.  Maybe he had to ask a whole bunch of permission to even get to writing Linux.  But I don’t think that’s how it happened.  I think, much as the lore suggests, that he reached out to people he knew he could work with who were intelligent, productive and probably contrarian and as the project grew too big he just handed parts of the development out to the willing and trustworthy and it… just… came together.  LETSI doesn’t have a Linus, but in a 2.0 world, maybe we don’t need one.  At any rate, the point is this:  if there are specs and standards that will help us do SCORM 2.0 faster and better, we should by any means necessary use them.  But we shouldn’t be sitting around with our thumbs up our butts debating and negotiating if there are other models available that are just as useful and (keyword mentioned already) “available.”

Now, Avron also asked another question:

“What software would be open source? What is the platform layer equivalent to Linux? What are some examples that would be broadly useful without unduly interfering with commercial product developers?”

Avron went on to rattle off a number of technology ideas (products) that LETSI could address, but I think that’s putting the cart before the horse.  What I’d like to do is answer Avron’s question with what I’m calling (to keep the meme going) the BAQON model:

The Baqon Model

The products LETSI can sponsor/support/steward may include ideas like Avron listed, such as: 

• Reload Redux: Raw XML editor for the new content aggregation 
• A migration tool from SCORM 2004 into the new format 
• A testing harness for SCOs
• A modular testing harness for LMSs
• An multi-student “lobby” for a game or simulation with sample interfaces to student and content data services.

…but in any case, the “platform” as pictured above support the use-cases.  That’s the vision.  Some of these bulleted items may be part of the Learning, Education and Training (LET) pillar that supports the platform, some of them might be part of the platform itself.  But in any case, the current players in LETSI are probably only going to be able to support the LET-specific pillar.

More on this subject in another forthcoming post…

I’m about five months into my mobile bliss, and I figured I’d share what I’m using the most.

Screen 1

• Google
• Remember the Milk
• Recorder
• Evernote
• Twittelator Pro
• Amazon.com

Screen 2

• iBlueSky
• Bloomberg
• i.TV
• Constitution
• Light
• TouchTerm
• NetShare
• Wikipanion
• Annotater
• Easy Wi-Fi
• Shakespeare

Screen 3

• AirSharing
• Google Earth
• Facebook
• WordPress
• LinkedIn
• fring
• Shazam
• Bookbag
• Sportacular
• Yelp
• Yammer
• Last.fm
• Joost

Screen 4

• Spore
• Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
• Tatomic Lite
• Comic Touch
• Sketches
• Pandora
• Ocarina
• miniSynth
• Guitarist
• Magic 8 Ball
• More Cowbell
• RjDj Single
• Cube
• Trace

Screen 5

• ColorsLite
• TellTime LITE
• Crash Kart

Apps I bought but am not using:

• Flickup
• Steps
• Todo

Apps I downloaded but am not using:

• Barcode
• DigiDrummer Lite
• Earthscape
• iChoose
• Internet RadioBOX
• Mocha VNC Lite
• Obama ‘08
• Stanza
• Tris
• Urbanspoon

Recently, Avron Barr emailed many of us as the Sponsors’ Meeting approaches this month.  LETSI very soon will need to get firm onhow to proceed we’ll proceed with the SCORM 2.0 effort. Avron writes…

“In addition to continuing the requirements gathering effort well into 2009 and possibly not calling what we are doing “SCORM” at all, we’ve also discussed the possibility of an open source software platform for e-learning systems and not just an updated reference model.

 

The actual open source effort might be a LETSI Working Group, a self-managed SourceForge community, or a Member Section in OASIS. We have a lot more planning to do. I’d like your thoughts about how best to explain why were are moving to an open source or “community source” model and what we might actually see coming out of this effort.”

 

I think he’s right on.  Some of us talked about this very notion at the close of the workshop and going on since then.  The way I’ve been thinking of it, LETSI is the organization that shepherds the process of gathering the requirements, shepherding the partnerships and architecture and holds the vision for what needs to happen, in terms of a platform for open-sourced organizational learning and performance improvement activities.  Some other organization, even inexorably linked, handles the open-source development of the technologies and tools that implement what LETSI comes up with.

For what it’s worth, while a bunch of us at the workshop bought the domain name as a joke, we do own baqon.org… because SCORM is simply better with bacon.  But I digress.

SCORM, per Dr. Eric Roberts (and Philip Dodds before him), solved two big problems back in the late 90s:  vendors selling LMSs who were tearing a fledgling industry apart with proprietary implementations that made content and data impossible to transfer (thus driving costs of implementation sky high), and lower the costs for acquisition of learning technology for the government while helping to future-proof their capital investments in both content and the technology to get it to soldiers and employees.

Those problems still exist, and SCORM has worked with glaring efficiency to solve those problems, but what’s happened since then is that a global community has gone through a lot of the same struggles working with SCORM.  There’s a lot we want to do with online learning (see those white papers and use cases).  But SCORM can’t solve all these problems by itself — and by that I mean that the same vendors with an installed base of clients who’ve specialized in solving specific types of problems over the past ten years now aren’t the only people who need to be involved with how their LMS technology integrates with performance management, customer relationship management, talent management, business application systems, etc.  LETSI has to pull in decision-makers, engineers and visionaries with a wider net.

Let me get specific so there’s no confusion:  LETSI needs Moodle.  LETSI needs Blackboard, too. LETSI needs WebEx.  LETSI needs SAP and Oracle.  LETSI needs SalesForce.  LETSI needs a bunch of partners who aren’t traditionally in the learning space.  All the ways in which educators, managers, owners and senior leaders want to see training and learning data mashed up with other types of data in their organizations — we need to work in concert… together.  I’m almost positive it’s not just the learning professionals who want to mashup this data — we all need to really think about our APIs because we can imagnineer (if you will) for the problems we can visualize today — but the best thing we as technologists can do for the future problems we can’t imagine is provide a way for people to interoperably combine our data with other data.

My goal over the next week is to enumerate what I’m thinking in detail.  My hope is that some conversation stirs up both here and on LETSI.org where we can get the best ideas out in the open.

Feel free to question or disagree with me.  I can take the criticism.

How significantly did your budget shrink?  How significantly might your staff size shrink?

I don’t know that anything more needs to be said here.  I walked in with high expectations after Casino Royale delivered on what could’ve been a pretty boring affair.  The opening sequence(s) were pretty awesome, too.  And then what followed was the introduction of what COULD HAVE BEEN an awesome huge evil conspiracy — but we never know in this film.  Instead, we get a bad guy who would’ve been dispatched by Jaws or Oddjob as a low-level lackey in any other Bond film — I mean, whoever the bad guy was in The Living Daylights had to be a better bad guy than this bad guy.  The super-secret organization that he belongs to that is such a big deal when Bond discovers it is freely mentioned publicly in another circle by the same bad guy in another scene later on.

Sure the one-time Bond girl (Fields, which for the record heralds what I hope will be the return of women with metaphoric names for their womanhood in Bond films) covered in oil as an homage to the girl painted in gold in Goldfinger is pretty hot… but in a film where Bond is so obviously just whining within himself as he kills just about everything (but for little purpose) I have no idea why she was there.  I’m surprised honestly given how much soul searching Bond was doing in this movie that he just didn’t want to be held and cry it out the whole time.

Anyway, there was great action scenes in the movie (especially the first 20 minutes).  I’m pretty frustrated by this movie, though.  It’s very uneven.  The amount of focus we have (and M has) on how full of rage and angst Bond is over the death of Vesper in Casino Royale really gets me angry.  If this Bond is so cool, he should be able to solve his emotional turmoil in-between the last movie and this one.  I mean, if it was just revenge, I’d be totally fine watching him wreak irreconcilable justice for two hours.  But we’re supposed to care about his inner struggle for forgiveness — and frankly, I didn’t pay to see some arthouse Bond meets Garden State deal.  I watch Bond to think about being him — not identifying with him.

So, anyway, the movie wasn’t terrible, but it angered me enough to snap me back into my pre-election snarkiness.

But… I’m pretty content.  We won.  Hope prevails.  I received and gave hugs to total strangers last week on Tuesday.  I still choke up just thinking about what millions of us just started.  Logan turned 4 and we had a birthday party, which turned out awesome.  In fact, aside from having flat feet that are acting up (I’ve been limping something fierce of late), I don’t have a complaint in the world at the moment.