Quick Update from Liz - May 13 2008

[liz lennon]

It's sunny and beautiful here in Ballinamore and I'm very tempted to go out and play.

For those of you that don't live in Ireland - you have no idea how much we treasure our sunny days - they are liquid gold. And - we had a crappy wet summer in 2007 which was followed by a very similar winter - we are craving sunshine.

SKIL2 is coming along. She's only 8 weeks old and a feisty puppy.

I continue to research and explore open source learning management systems and content management systems. It's all part of my learning. I have used Wordpress (for my other blogs http://lizbiz.wordpress.com) and now Ning - and am seeing how other people are using these platforms to build all sorts of networks.

I still have a lot of learning to do around platforms such as Moodle, Sakai, Elgg, Mahara, Plone and a few more. Ultimately for me it will be about which platform can capture the social media/learning cloud that I am imagining - and also be able to look beautiful and easy to use for my non profit clients.

As an aside - I am astonished at how ugly many learning sites are - do they not see the need and power in beautiful design? The way it can reduce the cognitive cost of using and browsing the site by people who may be technophobic (and even if you're not - we all deserve beauty) is astonishing.

Some highlights of the last week and this week:-

* Marc (my design mentor & brother in Singapore) has been working with me to design the visual branding for SKIL2. I was drawn to 2 of his options and was going to choose the one that felt comfortable but still beautiful. He gently encouraged me to explore the other option as it pushes more buttons. I loved the image but was worried people might misinterpret the meaning. After spending some time peeling off a few layers of the image meaning for myself - I was delighted to have a tagline wander fully formed from all the musing. It ties the image to meaning. All this was done via email over about 4 days. I'll post it here when it is finished.

* I have been invited for an interview next week (May 22 3.10pm) for a Social Entrepreneur Ireland Award. Delighted to have come this far and looking forward to chatting about SKIL2.

* I will know by the end of the week whether my national Irish charity/non profit will be adding financial resources to SKIL2. The CEO has read the info pack and my progress report and emailed me to say she was very excited about being involved. Cross fingers that I'll hear good news from them.

* I've been inviting people to be my SKIL2 mentors and am delighted at the positive response. People are really supportive and I'm offering champagne should they ever be in Dublin.

The more I research the more I'm seeing that there are very few non profits using social media and open source platforms as a tool to capture informal learning and engage people together as their own learning facilitators. A lot of the work being done is focused in universities and larger profits/ non profits - and mainly around instruction based learning & formal accreditation and recognition.

I'm very glad that there are people concentrated on putting together good online instruction based learning courses - because I'll be able to access them (the free ones) for SKIL2. My non profits don't have the resources to custom design their own learning courses - although I'm interested in some of the authoring tools I've heard about (thanks to Michael and his blog) - and - ideas around a kind of guerilla style of creating learning content - short, sharp & edgy.

The Open University (UK) has over 30 free online courses in their Open Learn online area - anyone can access them after you register for free. More and more universities are uploading podcasts of their lectures for free. I watched a lecture on depression and self harm (very important topic for workers in the homeless sector - who are the crew I'm developing the first SKIL2 for) by a clinical psych at Yale Uni last week.

And - there are heaps of good (and not so good) podcasts on a range of topics in You Tube. I'm also having a great time sorting through powerpoint presentations that people are uploading to Slideshare. And - I've downloaded a few good documents from Scribd - a space where people share documents on all sorts of topics.

Because my small to medium non profits have nearly nada learning and performance budgets - I'm trying to see what can be brought into SKIL2 for free - and still be quality. That's what I love about the whole ethos behind Open Source.

I hope your week has some sunshine in it. I'm off out to play now - can't resist the beams any longer.

Regards
Liz