About Me

A little background info on me:

• I work in the healthcare field in a rural hospital with several off-campus clinics.
  
• I work in the Information Technology department; I manage the Help Desk and am implementing a technology training project.
• e-Learning is my current focus and passion
• B.S. Ed. with 10 years experience as a public educator and Technology Coordinator
• 3 years in healthcare
• Open Source Software fan (Linux, Moodle, Joomla, Drupal, LAMP stack, Ubuntu, Red Hat, K12LTSP, etc.)
• I enjoy digital design for web, print, and other multi-media applications
• I am a "systems thinker" (and have been since before I even knew what that term meant)
• Certificated by The William Glasser Institute in the concepts of Choice Theory, Lead Management and Reality Therapy

Applications I use regularly:

• Adobe Photoshop & GIMP
• Powerpoint (yes, you read that correctly!)
• Adobe Premiere Pro
• Adobe Captivate
• Adobe Illustrator
• Firefox
• Blogger
• Twitter
• Joomla
  

The Art and Science of Rapid E-learning Design

I was discussing Adobe Captivate on a Moodle forum here. This got me thinking about workflow processes for rapid e-learning. This is sort of a touchy subject for those of us who create content because it is both a science and an art. We are designers (whether we realize it or not). We are artists (whether we like it or not). We are also psychologists of a sort as well as workflow analysts.

I think the best instructional designers realize the balance of science and art. We must stay abreast of the latest research in the field of instructional design and educational psychology. We must also keep current with the latest trends in Web 2.0 and software applications. This is the science part. We must also be aware of the art of design: layouts, typography, color balance, human-computer interfaces, etc. More than that we must be aware of the business use of our skillsets: our job is to help businesses become more effective/efficient and improve their bottom lines. We do this by providing excellent training materials which yield a performance improvement for employees (we hope).

If we've done our job well, we've helped employees improve their lives by improving their workflow processes. We've made the supervisors happy because productivity increases. It's a win-win-win situation. I love it! This is exciting and fun stuff to me.

So I'm going to outline my current workflow process for creating rapid e-learning content in a future post. I've learned much from Tom Kuhlman at Articulate on his blog (you should subscribe to it!).

Allowing Non-Students To View Grades In Moodle

I've been visiting the helpful Moodle community and asking about how to solve a particular problem I face in deploying Moodle successfully in my organization: viewing students' scores. Teachers, Admins and Students can all view scores. Teachers can see the scores of all students in their classes; Students can only see their own grades and Admins can see anyone' grades. But what about non-Students who are also non-Teachers and non-Admins?

My organization is not unique in that we have Supervisors who need to see the grades of their employees. Also, we have Human Resources personnel who need to see the grades of any or all students. The groups may not be Teachers or Admins. In fact I'd rather they not have any Administrative access at all. How to resolve this problem?

The Moodle community says setup special Roles for these users. You can view the post here.

11-year-old takes school network by the horns - Network World

11-year-old takes school network by the horns - Network World

Here was my comment on the article:

First, hats off to Jon! You did at 11 years old, what most of us adults would have done: needs analysis, systems design & implementation, then evalutaion (Deming / Shewhart PDCA Cycle). I suspect this is due to the influence of a Civil Engineer dad. Kudos to Jon and parents!

Instead of kudos to the school, a criticism. Shame on you for allowing your school network to devolve into the mess that Jon inherited. You have a responsibility to protect the computers from malware, but above and beyond that you are required by law to protect the students from the dangers of the Internet. The fact that most proxy servers / Internet filters also take care of malware, and that the school was riddled with malware, leads me to believe the school's Internet filtering may have been nonexistent. In which case shame on the school!

As a parent and a former Technology Educator for a small rural school district, I say shame on the school for ignoring their responsibility to their students. I understand the problems small schools face with finances, but that is no excuse to allow the computers to fall into such disarray. It represents a lack of understanding of the potentially negative impact that technology can make into the lives of students.

When I inherited a mess of a network, I discovered that 8th graders were surfing porn and leaving wallpapers on desktops that preschoolers were using! This is not acceptable! I immediately fired our existing network filter and deployed my own Linux-based DansGuardian filter. Then I removed malware. The result? I felt safe to let even my own children use the computers in my network.

From this story, I would not feel safe to let my own children use the network at this Baptist School - at least not until Jon has been allowed to clean things up!

Thumbs up for Jon! Thumbs down for the school management!