Reflecting on My 2010 Blog Posts and Happy New Year

Over at the Learning Circuits' Big Question it is time once again to reflect on the past year. So, I took a look at my most popular posts during 2010. FYI: I used eLearningLearning to identify my "Best of" posts according to social indicators.

Here are the top 10 posts written in 2010:

1. My e-Learning Don’ts


2. A Few Practical Tips on Storyboarding


3. Development Tools I Would Learn If I Were You - June’s Big Question


4. Looking for THE SCORM Resource?


5. e-Learning and Games in Healthcare


6. Keeping Up - April’s Big Question


7. What is HTML 5?


8. Voice Over in e-Learning, Sometimes


9. e-Learning via the BBC


10. Flash Tutorials on Screenr

While it is nice to see I still have posts from 2009 that make it in the top 10, I only included those written in 2010. The first thing that jumps out is that quite a few relate to development. Although on reflection I probably wrote a great deal this year on development. Any skew towards development is probably due to starting a new job last February and dealing with learning a new LMS, some new software, and getting reacquainted with some old software. All of which I was able to do and the blog helped by being a tool of self-reflection and a great source of helpful comments and shared resources from my very generous readers.

I was very pleased to see the "My e-Learning Don’ts" post at number one. I wrote it as a bit of a rant against "ineffective" e-learning, but it was tweeted quite a bit and was referenced in several other blogs. That was very flattering and on reflection I think I hit on many of the things that also irk others and sinks many e-learning projects. Hopefully it provided a dose of prevention... I know for me I will revisit it, and the comments generated, as reminders of what not to do.

Thank you everyone who visited my blog in 2010 and here's to a great 2011. Happy New Year everyone!

Jeff

My New Social Bookmarking Tool

I have been a big fan of social bookmarking and my preferred tool for social bookmarking has been Delicious. With the initial rumor that Yahoo will be discontinuing it and now the news they may be selling it,  I imported my bookmarks to Diigo. It was a very easy process and retained all of my tags. This is great because I often share these tags on my blog, Twitter, e-mail and even in the classroom, so seeing them preserved was very important to me. Here are some of the tags I share the most, which are now available in Diigo:

• Free_e-Learning


• Cloud


• Development_tools


• Games


• Captivate


• SCORM

I also added a Diigo widget to this bog. So, if you are a Diigo user you can bookmark my posts using the icon in the right column. I have also inserted a working example below.

Quiz Maker Pro Give Away

ProProfs has been nice enough to give one of our lucky readers a free copy of Quiz Maker Pro. They created a sample quiz, which if you score 100% you will be included in our drawing for a free one year copy. Below is the link to the quiz, which will give you a good feel of what can be done with Quiz Maker in addition to moving you closer to winning your free copy for one year.

How Teachers Can Use Web 2.0 In The Classroom (Quiz Maker)

The deadline is December 27, 2010. I will select a name from all who scored 100% and announce the lucky winner December 29th right here on this blog.

Good luck!

No Next Button - Some Examples

As I have written in the past, I have an aversion to "next" buttons. Here are some examples of courses without next buttons, or at least in a few cases very minimal use of next buttons.

• Blood Typing - NobelPrize.org


• Deep Brain Stimulation - Edheads.org


• Trace Space Back to You - NASA


• We Choose the Moon


• Mission: Turfgrass - Kevin Thorn


• Laptop Ports - Suddenly Smart


• Zombies in Plain English - CommonCraft


• Benefit Banking - One from my own portfolio


• Business Benefit Banking - Another from my portfolio

If you have examples of "next button courses" that you would to share, please feel free to add a link to it in the comments section.

DevLearn's DemoFest Webinar

Over at the eLearning Guild they posted the recorded DemoFest 2010 Highlights Webinar. I was lucky enough to attend the webinar last week and it was great to see the winners show off their work and learn about the design and development of these great courses.

FYI: If you are an Articulate user, Kevin Thorn (a.k.a. LearnNuggets) provides some great tips and tricks during his portion of the webinar (Mission: Turfgrass).

Head over to the eLearning Guild and check out the DemoFest 2010 Highlights Webinar.