I have written this blog for some time. Even though, as I documented in a post, I lost my history of posts. I try to post something about every month or so. Since my accident, I have been recovering. During that recovery (which, by the way, I am now walking again), I have learned the value of “writing things down”. I have had the habit of writing notes to myself, and collecting those notes. About 1 year ago, I switched to Evernote (http://evernote.com). I love it. It allows me to keep my notes organized and accessible from all kinds of computers. Since I work in the IT business, I have several computers. I have a home computer, a work computer, a work laptop, a school laptop, and the occasional borrowed system from a library or Internet cafe. Evernote allows me to access my notes from anywhere, and more importantly (at least for me), to write new notes to my collection.
I have found that if I write something down, I am far more likely to remember it. Which makes it less valuable as a note, but gives me better recall. I encourage you to start the tend. Use Evernote. Use index cards. Use Post-It notes. Use random scraps of paper or spiral notebooks. Take your pick. Write it down. You’ll probably be surprised what you remember you learned.
Due to my own mistake, I crashed my dual-sport motorcycle on Memorial Day weekend. As a results, I ended up in surgery to repair a broken tibia/fibula. If you want to read the full story (including x-rays), go to my wife’s (Lauren’s) website at: 2009 NC Dual-sport ride.
What kept my injury from being much worse was that I was wearing protective gear. I had a full-face helmet, heavy dual-sport gloves, motocross boots, and abrasion-resistant pants and jersey. If I wasn’t for the protective gear, I am convinced (and so are the EMTs and Doctors) that I would have been in much worse shape.
It has made me wonder. Why don’t we have protective gear for learning, both ILT and eLearning? After all, bad learning can potentially mess up a learner. Bad learning can have profound and lasting negative impacts. It can affect the learner’s self-esteem, their ability to learn in the future, the price of undoing the damage of the bad learning, and lots of other things. SO! Why don’t we have protective gear that keeps us (i.e., professionals in human resources development) from harming others? It is possible? Could such things be done within our tools? I know it is possible to do so through reviews with human reviewers, if those reviewers know what to avoid. But, within organizations producing learning, it is probably that a given problem may fester within the learning because no one knows to avoid it.
I guess what I am asking is, are there the 10 Things to Avoid (or X Things to Avoid) when creating learning, be it ILT or eLearning? Is it possible to create a cheetsheet to help us all? I’d love to explore this. If anyone is reading this, I’d love to get your input.
I have hosted this Wordpress blog on my website since Nov. 2006. Because I host it myself, I have done numerous Wordpress server software upgrades over that time. Everytime, the upgrade has worked flawlessly. I’ve been impressed. I’m still impressed, but today, the upgrade was not flawless. And, it is all my fault.
In the upgrade instructions, they tell you to do a backup. Of course I do backups. Except, I have upgraded so often, why take the time. Upgrades are quick. Upgrades are fool-proof. Except, today I met the fool.
My blog posts were lost. Thanks to Google’s cache, I was able to retrieve my writings. But, I can not restore their sequence. In fact, there are posts I do not want to keep. So, consider this a lesson learned. I have created an archive of my old blog posts. It is here:
http://technicaltrainer.org/BlogArchive.html
Now, off to do some work to create that archive. The time to do a backup is not looking so bad right now.
My 2 cents.