CivieBlog

This is a really nice tool that I have just discovered. It's called PhotoSoup and it generates wordsearch activities based on any topic in just seconds.

It's very simple and works on images from flickr. You simply type in your topic and the site automatically generates a word grid and image clues. You then have 90 seconds to find all the words. You can get hints and even get it to show you the answers.

Watch a short video to see how it's done. (499k swf)

How to use it with students

• This is great for vocabulary revision, especially with higher levels. Students could even learn some new vocabulary from it.
• It would look great on an interactive whiteboard (IWB) or you could give students a collection of vocabulary themes and get them to work on their own.
• Good to use as a filler for students who finish early
  

What I like about it

• It's free
• Each wordsearch it generates is pretty much unique
  
• The timing adds an element of motivation and competition to it
• It's just so simple
• I tried a random selection of very unsuitable words that students might put in and it seems that those words are censored, so you don't have to worry so much about badly behaved students looking at unsuitable images
• It's actually quite tricky

What I'm not so sure about

• Because it's based on the tags that images are given the words can sometimes seem a bit tangential
• It's actually quite tricky
• You can't save your wordsearches (Actually I've just discovered that you can. If you look at the top of the page you can click 'embed puzzle' and this will generate a code that will enable you to embed the wordsearch into a webpage or blog)
  

This is the kind of site that might have been custom made for language teaching.
Hope you find it useful and your students enjoy it.

Best

Nik

I don't remember what I was reading, but the post/article differentiated learning as what the learner does and training as what we do to the person - and hopefully they learn.

What's interesting is that eLearning has become pretty much synonymous with Online Training as opposed to use of technology for various kinds of learning.

In a world:

• where we have to be responsible for our learning,
  
• where learning and work are often not separate activities,
• where there's just too much for each of us to learn so we have to make choices,
  
• where we have to continually evaluate our sources of information,
  
• where we have to Stop Reading and instead Skim Dive Skim

How relevant is Online Training as compared to supporting Personal Learning?

This really relates to the questions being discussed in this month's Big Question (Instructional Design - If? When? How much?) where I've argued that Common Sense and Intuition Not Enough to justify ID. But maybe my concern stems partly from the targeting of smaller audiences, niche learning needs, diverse backgrounds - all that suggest a hard time for instructional design - although not necessarily for the right kind of instructional designer.

I'm not sure where I'm going with these thoughts, but it really struck me that confusing eLearning with Online Training is problematic. This relates to the discussions in Learning Systems and EPSS and ePerformance.

At the end of 2006, I spent some time thinking about 2007 and wrote a post challenges and predictions for 2007. This was a great exercise and the fact that I had not considered my big challenges for 2008 made it harder to do my Conference Planning for ASTD TechKnowledge 2008. When I was writing that post, I told myself that I really needed to sit down and define what I see as some of my bigger challenges right now. So, here they are ...

Well, actually before I dive in, I should provide some background to give context...

At any one point, I’m actively working with about 5 clients helping them define their direction around use of technology to support human performance. I will also be working a little bit with roughly 5-10 other clients. I typically talk with 2 or 3 new prospects each week who come to me randomly mostly based on personal introductions from people I know or through my various speaking, writing, blogging, etc. I spend probably 1-2 hours initially looking at what they are doing, and offering high level thoughts. A small percentage of these turn into actual clients and some percentage of the clients who engage my for consulting turn into clients who engage the designers, architects and developers from my staff.

In general, I love doing this. I really enjoy looking at a wide variety of interesting challenges and new ideas in different kinds of organizations. It’s fun to work for a lot of different people who often bring very creative ideas and varied skill sets. Life is not dull. In fact, if I could summarize my biggest challenge - and it's the same challenge every year - it's finding more interesting people, companies, etc. to talk to about what they are thinking about doing and trying to figure out creative ways to help. Of course, I need to break this down and think through this in more detail ...

So, when I look at 2008, some challenges jump out at me:

Challenge #1 - How do I balance time spent between blogging, direct conversations, small group virtual conversations, small group networking, speaking at virtual conferences, speaking at conferences and writing?

My goals for all of this are to accelerate my learning, continue to build my network, and find interesting opportunities. In terms of accelerating learning, blogging is definitely the best for me. However, I still get many more discussions with prospects through personal interaction and blogging lags a bit on that front. When I sit back and look at how I was introduced to various opportunities, my personal network that was built through years of different kinds of face-to-face interactions is still the biggest winner. Part of this is that geography has impact. The closer someone is, the more likely I am to work with them.

But maybe I'm missing better choices here. Can I be doing things different online to build personal relationships that rival what I have in my face-to-face network? Will this net more interesting opportunities?

Challenge #2 - How can I help individuals within corporations become better at work / learning skills?

I'm convinced there is a need here. People need help. I’m pursing a bunch of different avenues here to get smart on this topic. More on this during the year.

Challenge #3 - How do I get involved in more projects that really will make a difference?

The projects I like the most are those where I'm working directly with a start-up on their core systems, or working with a company where the project will impact people in a way that directly ties to the bottom line. There's no question of whether it has impact. There's obvious linkage to what matters. I see this happen on projects such as:

• Metrics-driven performance support tools
• Performance support tools and workflow
• Integrated psychometric models
• Matching Algorithm

Unfortunately, I randomly find these projects. I've tried various ways to get the word out and maybe my blog can help, but I'm still struggling with how to increase the likelihood that I'll find these kinds of opportunities.

Challenge #4 - Get smart on Advisory roles that would make sense

Out of the many people I talk to, in some cases it might make sense to take an Advisory role. Several have asked. Normally the conversation stops as we mutually struggle with defining a model that works.

• I have to figure out what some of these models might be.
• I have to figure out if and when it makes sense for me to take Advisory roles.

I'm still working through defining these challenges, and I would very much welcome any thoughts that folks have around this.

Dennis Coxe posted Let me tell you about...Excuse me, what were you saying? about an article: The Post-Literate Era: Planning Around Short Attention Spans. The article is more or less summarized in the following graphic:



Dennis' point is that this points us to designing eLearning that is shorter and to the point.

The advent of shorter attention spans that successful learning events need to engage the learner, but I think this concept has often been given lip service while the focus of most learning is on how to save dollars by using software that will allow rapid development of e-learning courseware by the subject matter experts who know their materials. Unfortunately the subject matter expert may not be the best story teller.

Great points ... I also wonder if changes around reading styles (see Stop Reading - Skim Dive Skim) doesn't suggest better content presentation formats to make sure that people get the few critical items.

In the 2008 Horizon Report, they discuss various technology trends including. Their comments around Social Operating Systems is interesting:

The issue, and what social operating systems will resolve, is that today’s tools do not recognize the “social graph”—the network of relationships a person has, independent of any given networking system or address book; the people one actually knows, is related to, or works with. At the same time, credible information about your social graph is embedded all over the web: in the carbon-copy fields of your emails; in attendee lists from conferences you attend; in tagged Flickr photos of you with people you know; in your comments on their blog posts; and in jointly authored papers and presentations published online.

This is a good definition of what we need from an open layer that allows a transportable, open social graph that we can leverage across various applications.

This address a critical problem that we face right now that I described in Social Networking Entrepreneurial Opportunities on my SoCal CTO Blog.

Certainly, what we are seeing with OpenSocial and DataPortability represents a possible future state where we can avoid some of this issue. If we could focus on building our "destination" on top of a set of open protocols that provide us with the social graph for users but that allows us to control our destiny, I believe that's the right model in most cases. It reduces friction for end-users and still gives us the leverage you want.

What I found interesting and I disagreed with was the statement that:

The essential ingredient of next generation social networking, social operating systems, is that they will base the organization of the network around people, rather than around content.

First, I don’t necessarily consider the social operating system to be “next generation social networking” – rather it’s a layer that allows us to have transportable information between all the places that knows about our information. Social networking sits on top of this and provides interfaces that allow us to interact.

Second, I don’t agree that next generation social networking will be based around people rather than around content. My personal experience is that content and social networks are intertwined. Blogs are both content and a social network. There is a social network around del.icio.us, YouTube, Flickr, etc. I’m much more likely to form and keep a social network when there is common interest in some form of content. And as we see more and more niche networks forming – they will almost invariably form around content. In fact, the Social Operating System will make it more likely that common interest and content will be the tie that binds.

If you go to the introduction page for OpenSocial, you can see that it too focuses as much on content as it does on person to person. The image is great and shows that OpenSocial thinks of the social graph as being BOTH people and content.

Jay Cross jumped in early with a response to this month's Big Question. The question this month is:

For a given project, how do you determine if, when, and how much an instructional designer and instructional design are needed?

Jay Cross response concludes with:

The answer this month’s Big Question is: common sense and intuition.

I love mixing it up with Jay. Neither of us is shy about our opinions. And while I would agree with him that the current answer to the question is common sense and intuition, this shouldn't be the answer going forward. It's clearly insufficient. How do you back it up when you ask for funding?

Further if you look at Jay's examples and turn those into theoretical projects, e.g., help audience X, with background Y:

• learn to speak French
• learn the way to the store
• learn Ruby on Rails
• learn to negotiate
• learn to taste wine critically
• learn to lead effectively

You would need to break down each quite a bit more right. Haven't we already required some ID? So is there some level in every "help learn ..." type task?

I don't buy that the end of the answer is common sense and intuition.

Genie left a great comment on one of my favorite posts - Top Ten Reasons To Blog and Top Ten Not to Blog. She said:

"Because this is the way that we're going to learn in the future" - I love it!

Not sure about the 9 year olds though, my kids are downloading music and games and creating their own language on messenger. So not so certain about reading - no one reads these days - they play. Blogs are the last gasp before virtual interactive education takes over the schools. Plug in and turn off.

The 9 year olds reference is around a statement made by Karl Kapp - “my 9 and 11 year old sons have a deeper understanding of the tools” than you do.

Genie made me think a bit ... (thanks Genie) ...

While she is talking about kids in the future and their use of writing and reading, it really made me wonder:

Do we read anymore? Should we read anymore?

I know that I rarely really read anymore ... I skim and then dive in depth and then skim. I read as few words as possible. Just enough to get the general sense of what is being discussed. I miss a lot of detail, but I also am pretty good at being able to find the detail when I need to get to it.

I have a horrible habit of reading my email using this same reading style. This means that I sometimes miss important pieces of information buried somewhere in an email. [Edit - I originally wrote horrible. But I'm not so sure.]

And, in comparison to most executives that I know, I'm quite thorough. Send most executives a two page email and you are lucky if they skim the first two lines. Do they read their business books in depth? Did you read this? I don't think so, they find the single concept and then figure that the rest of the 200 pages give great support for that concept.

Genie is talking about kids, but in thinking about what she said and my own behavior, actual reading of items from start to finish is pretty much gone.

My bet is that many of you have skimmed right down to this item. Did you miss the question I asked in the paragraph above?

There's an embedded poll right here to show you how many people are skimming vs. reading.



My bet is most people, especially those reading blogs, are skimmers. And, they are right to be skimmers! So -

Stop reading.

Skim, dive, skim. That's the way to go.

Oh, and you need to have skills around understanding, keeping and refinding. You skim at a level that gives a basic understanding, allows you to make a decision around what it is, do you need this again and how you will store it away (if at all).

The only time you actually read something is when you need all the details for processing right then. Otherwise, it's a waste of time to go through all the details. You only need enough to understand what it is and get back to the details later.

Most often there is no payoff for reading. Skim dive skim is the best ROI on your time.