I will no longer be Blogging…

… from this blog address!!! (go on admit it, I had you going didn’t I?)

I have decided to move my Blog to a self-hosted site, this decision was reached as a result of some research I have been doing for my Organisation that has involved me ‘tinkering’ around in a self-hosted WordPress and have discovering the wealth of plugins that are available.

Now admittedly I may be guilty of appearing like a child in a sweet shop

and I probably don’t need any of the plugins right at this moment in time, but I am conscious that as my blog grows in size and as my expectations of it may well change in the future it would be more difficult to export it’s content months or years down the line rather than at this present moment. And boy am I glad I did!

The problem you see, is not caused by the exporting (in fact this is really simple to do and incredibly quick) but by the fact that once your posts are imported any videos or audio are stripped down to the bare code so instead of a YouTube video appearing like this

 

It appears like this…

http://www.youtube.com/v/pw4nVUuE4wc?fs=1&hl=en_GB&rel=0

Not a good look in anybody’s book, the problem is the same for any audio clips I had embedded!!!

So for the last week or two my nights have been spent trawling through my newly imported blog posts ‘fixing’ them.

Some short-term pain for (hopefully) a longer term gain. If nothing else it’s been a good opportunity to read back through my old posts and reflect upon my journey to date….

For those of who can see pass the HTML code, here is my new blog (check out the address) site and I hope you will subscribe and continue to follow me ‘over there’

I’m guilty, but I am trying….

… to vanquish the ‘old-school’ information dumps and click-next type of elearning that are the bain of many of our lives.

I must admit that this critical insight into best practice Instructional Design has only come about since we moved to a self-authoring tool, meaning that some of my previous attempts have ‘ahem‘ been very….. traditional😉

I was still quite proud of my previous attempts as it was the first time that I had ever created such a piece of content, however the screencast below shows my very first piece of elearning concerning the use of Display Screen Equipment and highlights some of the retrospective ‘niggles’ that have grated on me since I started looking into ID in greater detail.

Having now researched ID in greater detail, I followed up the above module with Version 2 which can be seen in the screencast below. In the screencast I outline some of the changes that I have made since my original attempt.

The inspiration for this approach was provided my @tomkuhlmann and @catmoore. Tom for the idea of creating the ‘look and feel’ of the module in PowerPoint before importing it into our rapid elearning tool and Cathy for her ideas on ‘dumping the drone’ and her Action Mapping process.

Somewhat disappointingly, the DSE Subject Matter Expert wouldn’t sign off the above module as I refused to incorporate ‘knowledge checking’ questions into the module…

…oh well…

it was good practice and I hope that you can gain some ideas and inspiration from it (even if my colleagues won’t benefit!)

Podcast #3: Project Management… what’s that all about then?

Craig chats with Jane Brotchie on the subject of Project Management. This podcast will count as a piece of evidence towards a group activity within the Certificate in Web Content Creation & Management programme.

Download podcast in mp3 format: Project Management, what’s that all about then?

Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.

Shownotes

• smartsheet (Project Management tool)
• Huddle (Project Management tool
• Open Source Project Management Apps
• SAP
• PebblePad (eportfolio/Personal Learning System)
• Crystal Clear Writing (Jane’s website)

Music Source.