Seth Godin on why you should take your life into your own hands: be an artist/genius

Yesterday I want to the Elizabethzaal in Antwerp, Belgium to hear Seth Godin talk. At first I was not sure this would benefit me, as he focuses on marketing rather a lot and ... I am into learning and not all that keen on the consumption industry. But I did learn that opening up to people, will give you more understanding. Well, I must admit, I liked his speech. I liked it for many reasons, but most of all because he plees to leave the traditional classroom, ex-cathedra, data memorisation school and ... be creative and shape your own life.
This idea of course is not that new: Napoleon Hill wrote about that in his book Think and grow rich , Steve Chandler did in his 100 ways to motivate yourself , Jay Cross has put some questionmarks on education as well. So, Seth Godin is not alone with promoting this idea. But what is nice, is that he links your own development to daring to leave your comfort zone, daring to go ahead and act despite your natural fears that keep you from being the leader of your own life and potentially (but not necessary) the leader of others.
What was actually surprised that Seth Godin, who people told me was a marketing guru, also emphasized the importance of making a difference and being human.

Basically he said that We all look up to our heroes, but only a few of us strive to be one ourselves. Yet, in this era we can all become our own hero/genius as we have the power and the production possibilities (= internet and a connected laptop).

I tweeted during the session:

• you r never gonna be the only one. We branded ourselves to death. What worked in the past, no longer applies: if it already exists, you can't win the race. Be a creator, an artist.
• trust, belief, one person at the time, take the people where they want to go, be exiting.
• connect to the people directly, choose to make a difference, what you want to do is important enough so do it.
• do not be interchangeable, be creative, (e.g. Japanese bar sells to you what the previous person ordered, so as you go up to the bar, you are pressed to think: will you order a wonderful dish for the next person (you will probably not know) or do you order something horrible? Which side of humanity do you serve?)
• choose to do The Other Thing, creating smth human, do not do what can have a best possible score but never be unique (e.g. bowling).
• own the system and own it... Thx the internet, lulu... You no longer need to be obediant, you can act and deliver/ship what you want.
• competence is no longer scarce, many people become competent in what already exists.
• if you can automate your job description, you loose. Build your own thing, do not follow.
• solve interesting problems.
• Realise what the instructions are you follow, what is the worst thing that can happen if you stop following? think branson, when he has a thought, he does it and of all the ideas he has some really work (even the ones that others perceived as impossible: space tourism).
• do art that matters and is human.
• Kulak (name is wrong... ) general us army: found that the least paid, lowest echelon soldiers now makes the difference in the wars (remark from myself: is grassroots moving up?).
• do not make boring stuf for average people.
• give gifts to come together and connect.
• make the world better, go against the lizard brain, do emotional labour = work by thinking.
• make an experience, your job is your platform to art, you know how to be a genius, belief it.
• Your idea would be just a drop? The ocean is made out of drops.
• be autonomous, no chief above you.
• take small and immediate steps.
• the act of writing is an act, discipline is important.
• make your luck, by doing it again and again and again, figure out what you wanna do and do it, do not sleep until you know.
• socks story (a company that makes socks that never match, so kids talk about it in schools).
• home school your kids to solve interesting problems, teach them to lead.

He did not just preach, he also opened the floor to Q/A. concluding that most politicians are no artists, but in fact governed by the industry (most politicians are interchangeable puppets).

On that note... I am off. Happy Easter to those that celebrate it, in Belgium we eat huge amounts of chocolate. We tell our children that 'the easter bells will come and drop chocolate for all'.

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We are looking for a master or phd in education who wants to work with international partners? Look here...

We are looking for an academic network coordinator - know anyone who fits this profile?

Be aware that the main focus is on education and pedagogy, and working with different cultures. So if this rings a bell, send your resume! And mention that you got the call through Ignatia/Inge de Waard (that's me, e will sometimes collaborate).

You will be asked to live in Belgium. Here is what the campus building looks like (normally International students roam around on these grounds):




The Institute of Tropical Medicine (ITM) in Antwerp, Belgium seeks to recruit an academic collaborator with as main task the support and coordination of an international network of institutes involved in higher education in tropical medicine and public and global health. This network (LINQED - http://linqed.org/ ) is part of a collaborative program for academic capacity strengthening in low and middle income countries, funded by the Belgian Ministry for Development Cooperation. Currently, LINQED counts 12 member institutions from Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe and has as central theme “Quality care in higher education”. Actual projects relate among others to academic quality assurance, e-learning, academic exchanges and joint programming.

Assignment
• Coordinate the management and activities of LINQED in collaboration with its international executive committee. This includes the preparation and attendance of network meetings and workshops, management of information flows and updating the network website.
• Provide academic support to the network partners regarding curriculum development, learning concepts and methods, staff training, quality assurance and accreditation processes.
• Manage the resources of the network, prepare meeting and annual reports, and write concept and scientific papers.
• Contribute to the general concepts and management of academic innovation, international networking and capacity strengthening at the ITM.

Profile (do not be scared if not everything fits)
• Holder of a master and/or a PhD degree in a relevant field, preferably in pedagogical sciences.
• Postgraduate training related to professional and academic health education is an asset.
• Experience in the development, management and quality assurance of higher education programmes.
• Strong and proven skills in communication, problem-solving, academic writing and teamwork.
• Active knowledge (spoken and written) of English and French.
• Willing to travel overseas (occasionally, short term missions) .

Additional assets include
• Experience with ‘teacher training’.
• Working experience in the health and/or education sector in low or middle income countries.
• Conceptual knowledge and practical experience in networking.
• Knowledge of Dutch and Spanish.

We offer
• An intellectually stimulating, international and socially committed environment. Personal initiative and creativity is encouraged.
• An initial contract of one year, with perspective of renewal and/or a long-term position.
• Commencement of employment: May 2010 (but flexible if necessary).
• A salary according the ITM and Flemish Universities scales, taking into account relevant experience and education.
• Reimbursement of public transport costs, bicycle compensation, private pension scheme (after two years); Belgian social welfare and benefits.

Interested?
For more information, please contact Govert van Heusden, academic coordinator - tel: gvheusden (at) itg.be or Hilde Buttiëns, promoter Educational Network - tel: hbuttiens (at) itg.be.
If you get this, put in you got the call through Ignatia/Inge de Waard.
Applications with motivation letter should be received by e-mail, by April 9, 2010.

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Please, make eLearning simple! The eLearningQueen does it…in a Survival Book

Sometimes you just want to read a fun book about your profession. Fun, exciting, a good overview is all I need at times. So what a great find I had, because the eLearningQueen (= who is a Dog, who has an human assistant: Susan Smith Nash) manages to do just that! Read this book (this is the link to the free version, which will only be here for a limited amount of time!), it gives a nice, light and fun overview on eLearning.

Even the (sub)title is fun: “Elearner survival guide: Everything you need to succeed in the wild and wooly world of mobile learning and e–learning, and hybrid college, K–12 and career courses.”

Susan writes with wit and clarity, her blog is captivating and … I am jealous (in a good way) of her writing and learning skills. So, I will take what she wrote and how she wrote it with me, to contemplate on what I will do in the next couple of months.

What does Susan tackle in the 295 pages of her guide? She tackles all the topics in fluent and short paragraphs, and linking it harmoniously to relevant research.

• She begins with what eLearning is, and covers some of the known terms (e.g. push<=> pull);
• There are also hints on what study skills we will all need to succeed in eLearning (self regulation, checklists, practical steps, collage credits, free online software training,…and twelve very useful sanity-saving tips)
• Chapters 3 and 4 cover writing skills, dividing it into technical writing and research writing tips.
• Mobile learning and Web2.0 are covered in short, but very understandable paragraphs. In this section Susan also looks at practical adaptation in a k12 (teenage students) setting.
• Getting personal with looking at profiles of eLearners and careers.
• Now, and this part I truly LOVED immensely (because it linked me to some persons from my past, which… I did not take into account in the last couple of years). Susan managed to clarify to me that personal hero’s of whatever discipline can be linked to eLearning: picking up examples from the wonderful poet Maya Angelou , and the great political activist and anarchist Emma Goldman – need to read ‘Living my Life’ again, a.o.
• The last chapter focuses on institutional challenges and eLearning, or what they mean to the eLearner, which is also very relevant if you are linked to an educational institution.

So, I am very grateful to Susan for this unexpected book treat, I will ponder on what she wrote, and how she wrote it for my seclusion week is coming up. This means I go home, buy everything to last me a week (at least), cut off my internet connection, log-off my phone, leave the door bell ringing, push all humans out of the house… and do whatever I want, when I wanted, completely disconnected… for one week. Time to meditate about where I am going, and looking whether my passion is indeed still fulfilled with the work I am doing, at the place I am doing it. I have radically changed my life a couple of times trying to synchronize my professional life with learning passions and up until now it has worked. Professional satisfaction is crucial for me, for it takes up most of my waking hours. But fine-tuning is still needed, so meditating is a good path and eye opener.

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Make your Joomla or Drupal learning environment mobile for any mobile device and for free... YES

While my focus was on the learning system of Moodle the last couple of days, there are also free and open source projects for other CMS's (Content Management System). Like the Osmobi initiative developed by Siruna (University of Ghent, Belgium spin-off).

Now let's say you are a learning manager in your organization or institute, and you have a Joomla and Drupal CMS. Your learners/students ask you (after buying an amazing array of different mobile devices) if they can access the learning content through their mobile phones (yes, that is how these things happen, we all know it - that is how it happened in my institute as well).
Than what do you do? Do you say 'no, to difficult', or do you take a chance with some easy to adapt (only tech stuff is choosing 'themes' and some minimal settings), fully ready package that enables access for a mind-blowing set of mobile devices? Well, of course you go for the second option!

If you are using a CMS or LMS for your educational organization or your company, it will definitely save you time and money to incorporate the Osmobi into your system and try it out. The developers have included a step-by-step tutorial, that makes it really simple to alter the application for your own needs.

Today I got a message from Frank Gielen, he is the CEO of Siruna (which developed Osmobi) a mobile application that turns your Drupal or Joomla CMS into a mobile platform. And it is for free! (thanks to the Belgian Government and some commercial partners).

The added advantage of this mobile application, is that it incorporates an intelligent layer that recognizes your mobile device and as such redesigns the layout to fit its mobile needs (size of screen, operating system...). So ANY mobile will be recognized! AND what is even more wonderful: in case your mobile device is recognized, but not yet supported by the system, the system itself will go and look for the necessary data on the web to enable optimized access for that mobile device. Afterward this new information is added to the central information of the application.

Here is the link to the tutorial, and for those who want to see an overview of the application, look below.

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Moodle accessible for Androids: first steps taken

Many of you have asked the iPhone/Moodle team to break open the code and enable access for Android smarthphones as well. Well, our formidable and wonderfully skilled developer Beto Castillo Llaque has done ground breaking work (again).

If there are any headhunters, pick-up Beto's name (who works at the Institute of Tropical Medicine Alexander von Humboldt), he is truly an amazing PHP developer and... astonishingly quick and creative!

For those of you who have an android phone, try-out the demo-site we created initially for the iPhone, we have added additional coding to give access to android phones, so try it out, but remember these are just the first preliminary steps in the recoding... so do not expect everything to work for the Android phones yet.

Beto has made a youTube movie on the possibilities with the Android. Now the movie is not yet edited, but you really get an idea of what it looks like. For this movie he used the android simulator. And if you look closely you can see his picture.

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iPhone/iPod/Moode: one click to Moodle button

Some of our volunteer testers of the iPhone/iPod/Moodle web-application have indicated that they struggled a bit with having to login again each time they went out of the application. The team has enabled easy access by offering a 'home button' that can be put on your iPhone/iPod screen and with which you can simply login with one click.

Hope this helps!

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How to add a retweet and facebook button to your blog

With all the commotion with opening up Moodle to iPhone (and now some android driven phones, but still in the initial try-out phase), I was not keeping up with my blog lay-out. But now, I finaly got the retweet button for blogger embedded in my blog html template, as well as a facebook button.



In order to do this, I relied on the blogger plugins blog: here is the link for the retweet button and this one for the facebook button. But to make things easy, I wrote down what I chose.



For the retweet button, I used this code:



<div style="float:right;padding:4px;">

<script type="text/javascript">

tweetmeme_url = '<data:post.url>';

tweetmeme_source = 'your_twitter_user_name';

script>

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://tweetmeme.com/i/scripts/button.js">script>

div>





Mind you, I did replace the fourth line with my own twitterame, so that line became:



tweetmeme_source = 'ignatia';



But there are other types of button layouts, so check the post on bloggerplugins if you are looking for something different. Once I got the code, I followed the steps below:

How to install the Retweet Button on your blog?

1.Select the retweet button styles,and copy the corresponding code into a text file.

2.Now in this code replace your_twitter_username with your actual twitter username (e.g. ignatia)

3.Now we have got the final retweet code.Now login to your blogger dashboard and navigate to Layout > Edit Html and expand the widget templates

4.Find this piece of code

< div class='post-header-line-1'>

and immediately after that place our retweet code(from our text file) < div class='post-header-line-1'"> and you are done :)

If you were unable to find this code in your template,then look for the first occurrence of

<data:post.body/>

and immediately before that, place our retweet code(from our text file)

5.Save the template.

For the facebook button, I used this code:

<div style="float:right;padding:4px;">

<a expr:share_url='data:post.url' name='fb_share' rel='nofollow' type='box_count'/>

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/connect.php/js/FB.Share"/>

</div>