Agam Fhéin

I meant to ask Jay about the different aggregators he'd been playing with, but had (billable) work to do today. Naturally I didn't want to overdo on that, and I ended up stumbling across www.netvibes.com.

It's worth a look. While you find a bunch of (potentially annoying) present feeds in the middle of the page, you can easily get rid of them. What's more, you can add your own chosen feeds. This is what's worked best for me:

• Open Netvibes in one browser.
• Go to a site with a feed in a second browser.
• Position your cursor over the "subscribe to this feed" button. Right-click; copy the link.
• Switch back to Netvibes.

In the upper left, click Add content.

Click Add my feed.

In the dialog box that appears, paste the feed link.
Click Add.
Wait for verification.

Once verification is done, you should see a box with a list of most recent posts for that site.

You can drag boxes around in the main part of the screen. Or click them closed; they'll still appear in the "my feeds" list over on the left.


It took a bit of poking around to figure out how to delete a site I no longer wanted, and I haven't yet figured out how to delete any of the preset sits (Weather, Yahoo mail, Pricewatch, Fox Sports, and other things I could do without), but this seemed much speedier than the SuprGlu site.

-- Dave

As the noted learning theorist Tom Lehrer said,

Plagiarize!
Let no one else's work evade your eyes!
Why do you think the good Lord made your eyes?
Don't shade your eyes --
Plagiarize!

But, please -- call it "research."

Since I haven't been a regular reader of blogs, I've researched some of the sites that my unworkshop colleagues have mentioned. I've found this very helpful, both the direct sites (the ones they've visited) and the indirect ones (sites mentioned on sites).

On one indirect site, I read musing about the way languages are taught in secondary school. The author was taking his children to France, and felt that several years of formal schooling had left them still unable to have the simplest of conversation. He mentioned the Hotel Habbo (an online, Sims-like environment with a hotel them, intended mainly for kids and teens) as an alternative: his kids would have to use language skills to explore the hotel's world.

(Just now I discovered there's an English-language Hotel Habbo, too.)

Then, prior to my Skype conversation with Jacob, I happened onto the astounding ChinesePod, with daily free podcasts, RSS feeds, PDF transcripts...

I don't speak Chinese, so I decided to listen to a beginner-level podcast about buying a ticket. The entire podcast must have been 20 or 25 minutes long. I listened both to see what I might learn, and to consider the presentation from a learning standpoint.

I was sufficiently impressed that I have to restrain my urge to sign up for the free, 7-day trial, and then a couple months at the basic level ($9 for a month, $60 for a year)...

Chinesepod had an excellent getting started explanation as well.

---

So, my thoughts from touring blogs and listening to podcasts:

• I'm always interested in the content and organization of these sites: can I figure out what they're about? Can I find my way around? Who participants and why?
• Thinking of blogs and podcasts as vehicles, how's the content organized?
• What help is there for someone who prefers (or needs) more structured information?

I realize the last is not a requirement for every site. On the other hand, there's a lot to be said for "worked examples" that help someone figure the path from A to B. Jacob was a good guide for me in talking about podcasts, because of his greater experience; I showed him some of the behind-the-scenes stuff that can go into managing a wiki.

Now I'm interested in ways to synchronize more than one medium -- like the Heavy Metal Umlaut discussion of how a wiki works, posted on our unworkshop wiki.

Since I took the unworkshop mainly to expand my awareness, I don't yet have a client-specific project or purpose. I was intrigued by Jay's use of a wiki for content management, and I'll have to think about whether that's something I'd like to pursue.

As Chaucer said of the clerk, "gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche."

Background

After majoring in English and sociology, I joined Teacher Corps (a Great Society program like the Peace Corps or VISTA), earning a master's in education through an experimental teacher-training program.

One good outcome for me was training in independent study; another was exposure to Robert Mager's Preparing Instructional Objectives. A less positive outcome was my inability to find a teaching job in a time when secondard-school English teachers were more common than lobbyists in the U.S. Capitol.

I started working as a ticket agent for Amtrak, later becoming a station supervisor. Then I joined the corporate training department, which started my professional career by sending me to what was then the Programmed Learning Workshop at the University of Michigan.

At Amtrak I eventually headed the computer-based training group, directing training for what was then the in-development reservation system. I later moved to GE Information Services, where I spent 18 years in a number of training-related positions, working with internal clients and with customers like Chrysler, Merck, Kraft, GTE, GE Aircraft Engines, Porsche, and Philip Morris.

I've had my own consulting practice since 2002, and had worked on independent projects for many years prior to that. Most often I collaborate with others so that we bring a full range of capability to a client's needs. Typically the projects center on learning (closing a skill and knowledge gap), though often there's the opportunity to help the client rethink the problem (not all performance problems are skill/knowledge problems) or consider solutions other than formal training (job aids, work redesign, feedback systems, performance support).

I've developed online learning for several federal agencies (including the former Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Defense Acquisition Agency, and the Federal Aviation Administration) as well as commercial clients. I am also working on a series of skill-building workshops for specialists within a federal agency who oversee large, non-military, international projects.

My greatest experience is in training needs analysis, instructional design, and development; I have presented Joe Harless's Job Aid WorkShop countless times, as well as his instructional design workshop. In addition I've worked with numerous formats for distance or independent learning, from self-study printed workbooks through mainframe-based CBT to online learning in many forms.

I'm keenly interested in performance support issues. I was lead designer not only for training materials but instructor training and support for a project whose final phase included 5 days of classroom training for 2,500 members of a client's sales force -- delivered in a 17-week period. The market share of the client's #1 product increased by nearly 20% within six months of this training. Salespersons who attended were certain that the instructors (all of them contractors) were in fact employees of their company, temporarily assigned to the training.

I described many aspects of this enormous effort in a presentation (Water-Ski with Caesar) at the 1994 ISPI conference; I was invited to deliver it again as an encore session the following year.

The human performance technology model (e.g., as described by ISPI) greatly influences what I do and how I do it. I'm far less interested in have people use a blog (or Flash or videoconferencing) than in understanding the on-the-job results they want and the factors that contribute to achieving those results. ISPI has constantly challenged me to base at least some of what I do on data rather than personal preference.

After trying to figure out why I wasn't seeing in Breeze what Jay was seeing, I thought that I'd try capturing some of what I learned in the group wiki. That gave me the opportunity to work with the wiki.

I have done a little bit of work in Wikipedia, where I learned about "project pages." I think of these as a kind of meta-content. They're not really the main content of Wikipedia, but rather an way for people who are working on a common topic (often a large one) to plan together.

For example, Wikipedia has a separate page for each of the 107 U.S. Congresses, but the format for the pages varies widely. Someone might have been keenly interested in, say, the Eighty-ninth Congress, and so that page might have a lot of detail, whereas the Eighty-first Congress might have only an alphabetical list of members.

The Congress project page was an effort to coordinate the work of several people so that the end result would be useful and consistent.

Oddly, one fact that keeps slipping out of my consciousness is that not every page in a wiki necessarily appears in an index or a table of contents. The notion (especially for an encyclopedia) is that you search for a topic and get one or more pages that might match.

So I've just created a Tool Talk page in the unworkshop wiki, thinking of it as a place to discuss various tools we're working with. It would get long in a hurry, I think, and so I created a separate Virtual classroom page and linked to it from Tool Talk. I've entered the half-dozen things I know about virtual classrooms on the page, mostly as an exercise for myself.

See what you think.

A discussion I found on CogDogBlog, on the communities that keep wikis going.

In theory, you can start your post in the purported WYSIWYG interface and then fine-tune it in HTML. My advice is: don't.

I was fiddling around for too long in compose (WYSIWYG). When I previewed the posts, the font type kept switching on me. I tried cleaning things up, but that didn't seem to help. So I went into the HTML, after which Blogger kept complaining about tags that didn't close.

After a lot of most likely needless editing, I found whole strings of (font)(font)(font)(font)(font) and (span)(span)(span)(span)(span) [parens appearing here in the place of angle brackets] in the code, 15 or 20 per string, like runaway markup freight trains.

In addition, the default font and other layout items in create/edit posts are not those of my blog's template. More distressing, neither is what I see in preview.

Ah, well.

Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.

A stream-of-consciousness post explaining how I created Cousin Agam Fhéin, a site for family stories.

• The family side: people in my family, most of them born in Cape Breton (meaning on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia) are great storytellers. But these oral stories are gone as soon as they're told. A year or so ago, during a phone call, I taped my parents' recollection of how we came to the States. I turned that into a standalone web page.
  


• The writing side: in 2004, on my first trip back to Cape Breton in 24 years, I reconnected with my cousin Frank. In 2005, at age 60, he published his first novel, A Forest for Calum. (The Toronto Globe and Mail said that if there is any justice in the world, the book is destined to become a Canadian classic.) One of the main characters, the Calum of the title, is based on the grandfather Frank and I share, Jack D Macdonald. I learned a lot about Jack D from the book, and kept in contact with Frank.
  


• The technology side: I'd been thinking about blogs and other technology without having a specific use for them.
  

Eventually I sent Frank a link to that coming-to-Detroit web page, and to a different standalone page I'd made. He asked if I had a single URL to keep track of both. In the middle of replying to say "no," I suddenly saw how the parts fit together:

• I could harness the dynamic page construction and category/keyword power of a blog.
  


• I could choose to organize one in a different way from the lots-of-new-posts-each-day model.
  


• I could record, preserve, and share stories -- and invite others to do the same through the site.
  

I built an HTML-only site as a proof of concept. It had half a dozen stories, plus a page listing all the characters (people appearing in a story) and one listing all the storytellers. Even before I finished, I took my son's advice, downloaded WordPress, and started on version 2. The Gaelic phrase cousin agam fhéin ("my cousin / a cousin of my self") popped into my head, and I seized it as a domain name.

My primary audience (a high-flying term in this context) includes people related or otherwise connected to my grandparents -- I simply wanted some stake in the ground; I can always move the stake. As it is, there are about six dozen grandchildren like myself, not to mention our surviving parents, aunts, uncles, as well as our own children and grandchildren.

So the site is a way to share stories connected somehow to that group. Each story has the potential to build connections within the group.

My mother's brother Freddie died when I was a teenager. Even so, my children who never knew him can now see how Freddie Macdonald learned his name.

Technical and administrative ideas so far:

• I post most stories myself. I've recorded a few from my parents. People send others via email. I did give Frank author status on the site; he writes the stories, I tweak them for appearance before publishing them.
  


• I work at preserving the voice of the storyteller. I don't correct grammar, though I might with permission edit out extraneous detail. That's what I mean by "the storyteller tells the story.
  


• People have to register to comment, mostly to avoid blog spam. I created a "you're registered" email form, with steps for logging on and for making comments, to guide the less-than-leading edge users.
  


• I learned to create custom WordPress pages that with one click list all the stories, or all the storytellers, or all the characters. In the latter two cases, one more click produces all thes stories a person's told (or appears in).
  

What's next?

I keep wanting to tweak the home page. I'd like it to list the most recent stories (three or so), and maybe the half-dozen most recent comments, so people can see what's new.

I'm thinking of additional pages, maybe in wiki format, for things like place names, maps, family relationships -- though I don't want to morph it into a genealogy site.

I want to have photos, especially with some automatic organizing/categorizing, and I want that to appear as an integral part of the site.

I'm pleased with the results so far. As they say,

Cha mhisde sgeul mhath aithris da uair.
(A story's no worse for being told twice.)