Elearning! Learning Leaders Awards — Congrats to NSTA

Awards for educational and online learning are often bestowed on corporations, so when I see an association does to recognized for the hard work it does for the benefit of its members, I applaud long and hard.

Congratulations to the National Science Teachers Association, which garnered a 2007 Learning Leaders award from Bersin & Associates. 

Joining the Fray on Web 2.0

Jamie Notter, in his “The Myth of Control” blog entry, stirred up quite a blog ruckus (bluckus?).  Of course, a good bluckus means a great entry stimulated thoughtful and passionate comments and spurred more blog entries.

At the heart of the debate is whether associations are wise to be cautious in entering the Web 2.0 waters — what are the risks and are they overblown? Check out the full thread, including my own small voice in the fray.

Questions of liability and risk aside, we certainly need to face reality: social networking tools are here to stay, our members are becoming more adept at using them (and in many cases could be more comfortable in that world than we are), and we need to figure out how they could fit into our learning strategies.

ASAE Tech Conference

I’m feeling nostalgic for the technology conference.  I was honored to have been invited to be a content leader last year, but a scheduled review of one of our live events prevented me from attending this year.  After having met fellow ASAE and The Center members during the eLearning Conference and via other contacts over the last year, I would have loved to have been in D.C. to connect in person and gather all the knowledge my brain could absorb!

So I’m following what I can about the conference via the Web — this entry by David Sobol in his Associated Knowledge blog for example. 

And being grateful that if I had to miss the conference because I had to be someplace else, that at least that “someplace” was Miami.

aLearning Survey Results Summary

Development Teams 

One of the things I’ve been curious about is whether associations outsource much of their online learning development, and whether there’s a relationship between size of the organization and whether they outsource.