TechnicalTrainer.org

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.