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Author: Manish Mohan

Blogging & New Media Workshop by IBNMS

July 1, 2008
| 2 Comments
| Categories: Blogging, CEO blogging, Corporate blogs, Making money

I attended two sessions of the Blogging and New Media Workshop organized by Indian Blog and New Media Society. I was actually surprised to see a relatively large turnout. There would have been approximately 100 people. That’s not bad for a Sunday evening session and a working day Monday evening session. The audience was very varied in terms of their experience as a blogger and I commend how the presenters, Ajay Jain and Abhishek Kant, handled the audience questions with patience. There were also a significant number of women in…

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Introducing my kids to email

June 28, 2008
| No Comments
| Categories: Blended learning, Email, Kids

I am going to help my 11 year old daughter create her first email ID. I am looking for options available. Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo are of course obvious choices, but is there an email service specifically for kids? My natural parental instinct worries me about my children getting on the Net unmonitored. At the same time I wonder given the muck they watch on TV and read in the newspapers, does it really matter that they are on the Net unmonitored? Yet to play safe, I am looking for kids…

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Moving up the Web 2.0 Ladder

June 25, 2008
| 1 Comment
| Categories: Blogging, Web 2.0

I am moving up the Web 2.0 ladder to actually posting videos on YouTube :-). I thought it would be hard and I would need to convert mpeg file to flv before uploading. However YouTube allowed me to upload mpeg file without any problem and converted it into YouTube playable version quite seamlessly.Here are my two videos that I shot during my vacation. These were shot with a digital camera meant for stills and not a video camera, so the quality isn't the best video quality.1. Beetle inside a flower2.…

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Back from my Vacation

June 22, 2008
| 1 Comment
| Categories: Vacation

One week on "No Network" vacation has been great. I didn't miss the complete lack of connectivity until the last couple of days of my vacation. I took a trip to the hills, visiting Nainital, Binsar and Corbett, traveling by road. Returned to 154 unread posts in my Google Reader. eCube Facebook group membership has grown to 89. The unofficial salary survey I started has 39 responses now. I discovered that someone had copied content from my blog and pasted on another site without acknowledging the source. I was flattered…

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One Year of Blogging

June 7, 2008
| 2 Comments
| Categories: Blogging, Lists

I started blogging rather accidently, responding to a post on another blog. Sometime in June 2007, I wrote my post on my blog on Microsoft Live Spaces. I subsequently dumped that and started this blog on Blogspot. In Feb 2008, I also started eCube, a team blog. In one year, I am completing 50 posts on my personal blog (with this post), and another 19 posts on eCube team blog. I started tracking stats late September 2007. An anonymous commenter on my blog introduced me to Feedburner in Jan 2008.…

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Rapid Instructional Design with Thiagi

June 1, 2008
| 2 Comments
| Categories: ADDIE, Contextual learning, Instructional Design, Needs analysis, Training

I came across this video of Thiagi speaking at UMBC Training Forum. This is a longish video, about an hour and 40 minutes, but thoroughly enjoyable. Thiagi is at is irreverent best as always. Definitely worth the time to go through the video fully.Here’re some of the things he talks about in the video. What is contextualized learning? Learning that takes place in the real world to achieve objectives with real world relevance. He gives the example of a course with a mid-term evaluation as a non-contextual learning example. Content…

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Telepresence

May 30, 2008
| No Comments
| Categories: Technology, Telepresence

In the many blogs that I follow, much is being discussed about the use of virtual worlds for learning and game-based immersive learning. Now imagine if virtual world had not the avtars or characters, but real people interacting. Imagine what this would do to education and training. This isn’t a new story but I didn’t find this mentioned on the various blogs I follow. Human Productivity Lab runs a story of Cisco’s "On-Stage" Telepresence experience at the launch of their Globalization Center East in Bangalore, India. During a presentation to…

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Now that’s what you call Innovation!

May 29, 2008
| 1 Comment
| Categories: Innovation

I found this an absolutely fantastic example of Innovation. An upcoming band in Manchester, The Get Out Clause, unable to afford camera and crew to make a music video decided to use the 13 million CCTV cameras across the city. They set up equipment across the city and played in front of the cameras in 80 locations. Then they proceeded to write to the surveillance companies and asked for footage quoting the Freedom of Information Act. They managed to get their footage of about 20 locations, enough to make a…

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Unofficial Salary Survey of eLearning/Content Development Jobs – 2008

May 29, 2008
| No Comments
| Categories: eLearning, Instructional Design, Jobs, Salary, Survey

Update: See 2009 elearning and content development salary data here.Last year I initiated the unofficial salary survey for elearning and content development jobs in India on my blog. I invited responses as comments on my blog post. The post got 10 unique responses. While the number of responses were not enough to consolidate and provide any trends, what was apparent was that the elearning salary range in India is quite varied. One year down the line, it will be interesting to know what’s the situation now. What are the salaries…

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Innovation, Quality and Failure

May 16, 2008
| 4 Comments
| Categories: Innovation, Quality, Workplace Learning

There is an interesting discussion ongoing in our internal (behind the firewall) blog. It is getting interesting and I thought I would get some wider perspectives on this subject.My colleague writes:Innovation is a messy process where different alternatives need to be tried before we really get something new and useful. For one success there will be many failures. "Innovation" without some "Failure" is not feasible. Therefore, the system has to nurture failureOn the other hand "Quality" is about delivering on time, every time. "Failure" is not an option. Therefore, the…

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