Free ebook – Live Online Learning

*Disclaimer – I am a partner in Onlignment.

e-book

Over on the Onlignment website, we have just launched a free e-book download, a facilitator’s guide to live online learning. In 55 pages it covers:

  • Whys and wherefores
  • Planning your session
  • Communicating with voice and live video
  • Communicating using images and text
  • Sharing resources
  • Building in interactivity
  • Building up to the session
  • Facilitating the session
  • Following up

The e-book is issued under a Creative Commons license.

You can download the book here (we do ask you to sign up for our mailing list).

Poetry Heroes

Today in the UK it is National Poetry Day and the subject is heroes and heroines, so I thought I would take the opportunity to post one of my favourite poems, written to honour the pilots who flew in the Battle of Britain.

Fighter Pilot

He was no Galahad, no knight sans peur et sans reproche. Sans peur? Fear was the second enemy to beat. He was a common, unconsidered man, who, for a moment of eternity, held the whole future of mankind in his two sweating hands. And did not let it go. Remember him, not as he is portrayed, but as the man he was. To him you owe the most of what you have and love today.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Christopher Foxley-Norris

Tweet Psych

Just ran myself through Tweet Psych. Not entirely sure what this says about me, but here are the results;

Cognitive Content

  1. Present tense
  2. Positive emotions
  3. Tentative
  4. Future tense
  5. Upward motion
  6. Insight
  7. Senses
  8. Past tense
  9. Cognitive processes
  10. Space
  11. Occupation & work
  12. Motion

Primordial, Conceptual and Emotional Content

  1. Abstract thought
  2. Social behavior
  3. Constructive behaviors
  4. Concreteness
  5. Glory
  6. Restraint
  7. Anxiety
  8. Visual sensations
  9. Order
  10. Positive affect

Why not give it a try?

Nothing Important to Communicate?

speech bubble

Setting up this blog is something that has been on my mind for close to a year. That’s an embarrasing confession for someone who spends a great deal of time telling people that starting a blog is easy. There are several reasons that it’s taken so long to go from idea to reality, not the least of which was my decision to go from comfy corporate life to freelance consultant. But there’s more to it than that.

It’s about producing something worthwhile.

I’ve been reading Jupiter’s Travels, the story of Ted Simon’s four year journey around the world by motorcycle back in the 1970′s. Whilst travelling across Africa, he is reading one of Henry Thoreau’s journals, and reaches this conclusion;

“He wrote: ‘We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.’ If Thoreau were alive today he would have full confirmation of his fears. Instant information is instantly obsolete. Only the most banal ideas can successfully cross great distances at the speed of light. And anything that travels very far very fast is scarcely worth transporting…”.

So with no little trepidation, and keeping those thoughts in mind, it is my hope that this site evolves to be something useful. For those reading, and for me writing it.