Month: July 2008

Today is Chocolate Day

Chocolate hat © Ann de Gersem, photo C. BaeleWe now divert from our normal online-blah-blah-blah and take a reverent moment to acknowledge that it is Chocolate Day! Want a little chocolate fun? Take the Is It Beer or Chocolate? quiz (I did terribly at 51%). Look at some of the interesting links from Chris Hodge. Think about the political implications of your chocolate. The health benefits.  Chocolate as art and inclusion. (Image to the right — Chocolate hat © Ann de Gersem, photo C. Baele)

And yes, even a link to a story about online communities, support and of course, chocolate. Ah, so this post isn’t so frivolous after all. 🙂

Hat tip to Chris for pointing out this critically important day to all chocoholics.

Signed

Choconancy

Rituals for Healthy Living – What are yours?

Sao Miguel Island, the AzoresMy friend and neighbor, Ashley Cooper, has created a new blog to share what she learned when she asked her network, “what rituals do you do to invite balance and well-being into your life. She was so taken by the responses, she is compiling them into a blog, Rituals for Healthy Living.

When I work with people who are using the internet for work (and play, and life) the topic of “balance” often comes up. That tension between “face to face and online life.” (I cringe when the word “real life” is applied to F2F.) I realized about a year ago that I was ignoring the invitation to balance, so I have added some rituals to my life, like dance-like exercise, walking, simple daily meditations and trying to have the machine shut off one day on the weekend. However, reading Ashley’s new blog, I can see there are wonderful inspirations. So if you are looking for an invitation to balance and well being, take a read. Here is a snippet from the blog introduction:

Rituals to Invite Balance and Well-being

By changing the way you do routine things
you allow a new person to grow inside of you.
~Paulo Coelho

This site is a compilation of rituals and stories from many different people around the world. Each post is a different person’s response to an invitation to share their rituals for healthy living, activities or behaviors they do regularly for the purpose of bringing value to their well-being. Perhaps there is a ritual in these pages that will catch your attention and find its way into your own life. To help keep this site alive, comment on what you read, share your story if you try one of the rituals, and submit new rituals.

EFQUEL Slides Featured on Slideshare

I was surprised to get an email that the slides I used at a keynote at the European Foundation for Quality in ELearning are currently featured on SlideShare’s SlideShare’s homepage. Fun! This is one of the things I still need to blog about, but in the meantime, here are the slides.

I was a little worried about keynoting at a conference about quality in elearning – not my normal bailiwick. But I was pleased to learn about the work of this group as it is not all about rubber stamping a certification that is meaningless outside of any particular context, and there was a great deal of interest in the space between formal and informal learning – a space I’m very interested in.

Sitting with fire – a blog as community and reflection

Blogs are often touted as “individual voices.” Of course, blogs can be many things, including reflective community voices. Check out the blog of the Tassajara Zen Center in California, facing many dangerous fires in their area on the Central California coast. Sitting with fire.

What I noticed was their use of questions. Amazing. Short. Right to the heart. What can we learn from this blog about community?

Knowledge Sharing in the CGIAR – Tools and Methods for Sharing Knowledge: The CGIAR’s Wiki Approach

The ICT-KM Program of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) has an article out about a project that is near and dear to my heart and which I have been working on, the Knowledge Sharing Toolkit Wiki. Here is a snippet from the article, ending with a provocative question. Click in to read the rest!

Knowledge Sharing in the CGIAR – Tools and Methods for Sharing Knowledge: The CGIAR’s Wiki Approach
The Institutional Knowledge Sharing (KS) Project of this Program together with its CGIAR Center partners has been experimenting with a range of KS tools and methods over the past five years and has recently been assembling these and many others into a toolkit (http://www.kstoolkit.org/). This evolving resource – continually updated, edited, expanded, and critiqued in wiki fashion – is targeted mainly on scientists, research support teams, and administrators in the 15 international centers of the CGIAR. But it also serves their partner organizations, as well as development organizations working in areas other than agriculture. And it benefits from their diverse feedback too.Science has traditionally relied on a few key vehicles for sharing and validating new knowledge. The most important are experiment replication, the publication of research results in peer reviewed journals, literature searches, and formal and informal communications at conferences, workshops, and other meetings. In addition, the patent system serves as a complementary knowledge broker in instances where research spawns technical innovation. With such longstanding institutions already in place, why is there a need for new avenues to share knowledge? The answer to that question is surprisingly complex; but a few key reasons stand out.