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John Hagel is a co-chair of Deloitte Center for the Edge. Here he talks about influence points and positioning oneself among influence points through our technology enabled connections. Power laws still concentrate an extraordinary # of connections around a few nodes. But having access to knowledge flows, one will be able to anticipate what's going to happen before others do, one could perhaps shape the flows and more rapid learning may occur because of access to a growing and diverse set of information or knowledge flows. Learning faster than anyone else will enable a company or person to "have a significant advantage relative to those who are scrambling to catch up." Uses the PC microprocessor and operating system components to concretize influence points.

Great checklist and do's and don'ts for optimizing your resume for ATS including formatting, keywords, fonts, sections, and others.

" 5 Reasons Why Job Boards Aren't As Effective Anymore Don Goodman November 24, 2015 Job Search At one time, job boards were the way to go for job seekers. It's where you could post your resume for employers and recruiters to view, and apply to job openings. But today, it's a different story. Related: Reactive Vs. Proactive Job Search Strategies Job boards are simply not as effective anymore since there are social media outlets like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter where you can pretty much network your way to the right contacts. The fact is, job boards have a 2-4% effectiveness rate whereas networking has over a 50% effectiveness rate." More than 85% of employers use Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to review and rank resumes according to skills, experience, keywords. Companies use internal algorithms, so out of an average of 400 resumes using these measures results in only 10 - 20 even looked at. Most hiring managers and recruiters use Linkedin first. Job board resumes are still viewed, but chances are the info is outdated so relying on Linkedin makes sense for recruiters. Niche job boards are worth going to, but to be more productive tie into direct networking through the right contacts.

" 5 Reasons Why Job Boards Aren't As Effective Anymore Don Goodman November 24, 2015 Job Search At one time, job boards were the way to go for job seekers. It's where you could post your resume for employers and recruiters to view, and apply to job openings. But today, it's a different story. Related: Reactive Vs. Proactive Job Search Strategies Job boards are simply not as effective anymore since there are social media outlets like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter where you can pretty much network your way to the right contacts. The fact is, job boards have a 2-4% effectiveness rate whereas networking has over a 50% effectiveness rate." More than 85% of employers use Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to review and rank resumes according to skills, experience, keywords. Companies use internal algorithms, so out of an average of 400 resumes using these measures results in only 10 - 20 even looked at. Most hiring managers and recruiters use Linkedin first. Job board resumes are still viewed, but chances are the info is outdated so relying on Linkedin makes sense for recruiters. Niche job boards are worth going to, but to be more productive tie into direct networking through the right contacts.

Interesting annual report from quintcareers.com from 2012 about how ATS works, and how it screens out 90% of applicants based on key words only. Employers use it because of the sheer numbers of resumes they get and the cutting of ranks of hiring decision-makers , but there are many problems with ATS.

Blog post by Lisa Lane early this month (November 2012 explaining to another online instructor how she built a system for aggregating students' blog posts that may be relevant to WLStudio series and "sharing" activities? She uses FeedWordPress. Excerpt: "Participants set up their own blog wherever. Then I need to get the feeds from those blogs into the Pedagogy First! aggregated blog, using FeedWordPress. I use the Add Link widget (yes, I know it's old) so participants can add their own, and have provided more extensive instructions for them about blogs and feeds. In particular, we want people who post on many subjects to not only use the "potcert" tags for their posts, but use the feed for that tag only. This is so only their class-related posts show up on the class blog. The back end of this process is a little more complicated. When participants enter their information in Add Link, it goes directly into the Blogroll. The Blogroll is what feeds into FeedWordPress as a default. I customize the titles of feeds and the names of participants to use their real names for everything. I change the titles of feeds by going into FWP's Syndication area and using Feeds & Updates. Using the drop down menu to bring up a particular blog, I change the title and click manual control so it doesn't revert back the next time the feed updates. When I do this, it seems to update automatically in the Links area. Then I go to Users and make sure their names are their full names by editing them individually."

Fascinating article by Marina Gorbis on Fast Company site regarding how we must be able to learn online in micro-learning episodes that may last minutes, hours, days, weeks, etc. far removed from schools, MOOCs, and other structured and semi-structured curricula. Excerpt: "We are moving away from the model in which learning is organized around stable, usually hierarchical institutions (schools, colleges, universities) that, for better and worse, have served as the main gateways to education and social mobility. Replacing that model is a new system in which learning is best conceived of as a flow, where learning resources are not scarce but widely available, opportunities for learning are abundant, and learners increasingly have the ability to autonomously dip into and out of continuous learning flows. Instead of worrying about how to distribute scarce educational resources, the challenge we need to start grappling with in the era of socialstructed learning is how to attract people to dip into the rapidly growing flow of learning resources and how to do this equitably, in order to create more opportunities for a better life for more people." In the comments, this summary: "It doesn't matter if you are a physicist, chemist, sociologist, welder, mathematician, teacher, economist, lawyer, restaurant owner, farmer, trucker, whatever, the information most relevant and valuable to your employment is up to you to find! The task requires you find and digest information, on your own. This task used to be a pain, but now we have near-instant access to the entirety of information across the planet. The author is talking about making this access actually instant, not near-instant. Its really just an inevitable thing. "

Review by Rob Jenkins on the Chronicle, 3.18.13, on why MOOCs are a massively bad idea for wait-listed community college students in California as proposed in new legislation there. Excerpt: "We know that succeeding in online classes requires an extraordinary degree of organization, self-discipline, motivation, and time-management skill. A simple Google search of "how to succeed in online classes" yields a plethora of Web sites-including many college and university sites-offering students such gems as "be organized," "manage your time wisely," and (my favorite) "stay motivated."" Excerpt: So to recap, California's plan (or to be fair, one senator's plan) is basically to dump hundreds of thousands of the state's least-prepared and least-motivated students into a learning environment that requires the greatest amount of preparation and motivation, where they will take courses that may or may not be effective in that format. Here's a prediction: Those students will fail and drop out at astronomical rates. Then the hand-wringing will begin anew, the system will pour millions more dollars into "retention" efforts, and the state will be in an even deeper fix than it is now. (Virtual cheating will probably run rampant, too, followed by expensive anticheating measures, but that's another blog post.) Look, I'm not a politician or an economist. I don't know the answer to California higher education's budget woes. But I'm pretty sure herding community-college students into MOOCs is not it.

Article by Joanne Fritz at About.com Nonprofit Charitable Orgs on managing social media. She suggests "high activity on a limited # of networks." She uses Twitter (#1), Facebook, Google + (because it is growing rapidly and counts a lot toward SEO), and Hootsuite as her dashboard for social activity. Also recommends sharing reciprocity as indicated below: "I generally try to maintain a ratio of one for me to two or three of everyone else. One recent blog post suggested using the rule of quarters: 25% your content, 25% interaction, and 50% others' content. Of course, there is a reason for that. It's called reciprocity. When I promote someone else's blog posts or articles, that someone is likely to return the favor. When someone else endorses my work, that is much more effective than when I do it. My system for sharing revolves around my RSS Feed (I use Google Reader). The key to success with RSS is to get into the habit of checking it often. Otherwise it becomes a mess. "

Article by Kerry Hannon, Forbes, 1.25.13 This author asserts that older workers will become more valued by employers even though they aren't making special efforts to hire or retain them now and do not want to pay for the cost of training/retraining them. These trends suggest that taking charge of one's own learning with a PLP, PLN, etc. and taking advantage of all the free opportunities will be valuable skills to have. This author only looks to community colleges for retraining and does not reference any of the online options that we know about from the work on the directory. Should we draft a comment back to Kerry Hannon on this website? "1. Who is going to pay for that training? Most labor market experts I have interviewed say the government and private employers need to ramp up more training programs for older workers and create workplaces that make it easier for them to do their jobs. Employers don't want to spend for it. They've already cut to the bone to stay competitive globally in recent years and this kind of spending is a tough sell. Conceivably, as I discussed as a panel member at a recent Federal Reserve Workforce Development conference, one way to provide the needed training is through the community college system. The coursework could be offered at an affordable cost for the worker. Depending on who foots the bill, employers or employeees could receive tax incentives to ease the tuition bill. (Please continue to next page.) "

Interesting explanation of business model for how nonprofit and forprofit MOOC partners--edX, Coursera, and Udacity--will make money along with the universities. Implications for other, smaller online learning partnerships? Excerpt on two models (large-scale efforts) According to Mr. Agarwal, edX offers its university affiliates a choice of two partnership models. Both models give universities the opportunity to make money from their edX MOOCs-but only after edX gets paid. Related Content What You Need to Know About MOOCs Document: The Revenue-Sharing Models Between edX and University Partners The first, called the "university self-service model," essentially allows a participating university to use edX's platform as a free learning-management system for a course on the condition that part of any revenue generated by the course flow to edX. The courses developed under that model will be created by "individual faculty members without course-production assistance from edX," and will be branded separately in the edX catalog as "edge" courses until they pass a quality-review process, according to a standard agreement provided to The Chronicle by edX. Once a self-service course goes live on the edX Web site, edX will collect the first $50,000 generated by the course, or $10,000 for each recurring course. The organization and the university partner will each get 50 percent of all revenue beyond that threshold. The second model, called the "edX-supported model," casts the organization in the role of consultant and design partner, offering "production assistance" to universities for their MOOCs. The organization charges a base rate of $250,000 for each new course, plus $50,000 for each time a course is offered for an additional term, according to the standard agreement. Although the edX-supported model requires cash upfront, the potential returns for the university are high if a course ends up making money. The university gets 70 percent of any revenue gen

ALISON MOOC--"With more than 1.2 million unique visitors per month and 250,000 graduates worldwide, Advance Learning Interactive Systems Online (ALISON), founded in 2007, is considered by some the first massive online open course (MOOC). " blog by Ellis Booker, Information Week Education, Excerpt: "Our focus is workplace skills," company CEO Mike Feerick told InformationWeek in a phone interview. Indeed, ALISON started with two globally in-demand skills: English and IT literacy, the latter in the form of ABC IT, a 15- to 20-hour training suite that remains the site's most popular course." Excerpt: "Employers don't care where you found those skills or how much you paid for them," he insists. Rather, employers want one thing: Verified competency. One service ALISON offers is tests for prospective hires that employers can administer to check the competence of job applicants who come with ALISON certificates. For a small fee, students can purchase an ALISON certificate after successfully completing a course, as a PDF, paper parchment or framed parchment."

Blog post by Chris Collison, , on why organizations don't value implementing in a more systematic way the documented learning. "In my experience, many organisations sometimes treat lessons learned like they are an end in themselves - as though the value has to remain in the document - rather than where possible leading to actions which embody the learning. These actions might include updating a process, policy, standard or system has been updated to incorporate the learning, which removes the need to promote the lessons or recommendations to future teams. So why do some organisations settle for a pile of lessons rather than a set of improvements? Some possibilities: It's much easier to write a document than see a change through to completion. It's too difficult to find the owner of the process which needs changing. I'm measured on how many lessons our project captures. We have invested in customizing SharePoint to capture lessons learned documents, and need to show that we're using it. Although I wrote the recommendation, I'm not 100% confident that we should change the process for everyone."

blog post by Clay Johnson, Information Diet author, Lifehacker, Excerpt: "First, let's define notification. In the context of our discussion, a notification is something that comes from a service that the service deems worthy of your attention: The scarlet box at the top of every Google page notifying you of things happening in Google+. The messages you get from Twitter telling you that you have a new message. The email icon that shows up in your system tray telling you that you have a new email. Facebook letting you know what you're missing out on Facebook. Your sister's latest move in Words with Friends." Besides being disrespectful to your attention, notifications like this do something else that's much more nefarious: they train you to be a passive consumer of information rather than an active one. If we don't control the notifications we're receiving, we're forced to react to them: from Google's big red box, to Living Social's notification for a deal on backwaxing." Besides being disrespectful to your attention, notifications like this do something else that's much more nefarious: they train you to be a passive consumer of information rather than an active one. If we don't control the notifications we're receiving, we're forced to react to them: from Google's big red box, to Living Social's notification for a deal on backwaxing."

"The Varied Functions of Badges" summary from HASTAC discussion, 9/2012 My interest in the functions of badges was spurred along when the MacArthur Foundation asked for help documenting the design principles for using digital badges that emerge across the 30 projects underway by the awardees in their Badges for Lifelong Learning project. We needed to come up with a manageable number of categories. Here is what we came up with: Recognizing Learning. This is the most obvious and arguably the primary function of badges. David Wiley has argued cogently that this should be the primary purpose of badges. If we focus only on purposes, then he may well be right. His point is that badges are credentials and not assessments. This is also consistent with the terrifically concise definition in Seven Things You Should Know About Badgesby Erin Knight and Carla Casilli. Assessing Learning. Nearly every application of digital badges includes some form of assessment. These assessments have either formative or summative functions and likely have both. In some cases, these are simply an assessment of whether somebody clicked on a few things or made a few comments. In other cases, there might be a project or essay that was reviewed and scored, or a test that was graded. In still other cases, peers might assess an individual, group, or project as badgeworthy. Motivating Learning. This is where the controversy comes in. Much of the debate over badges concerns the well-documented negative consequences of extrinsic incentive on intrinsic motivation and free choice engagement. This is why some argue that we should not use badges to motivate learning. However, if we use badges to recognize and assess learning, they are likely to impact motivation. So, we might as well harness this crucial function of badges and study these functions carefully while searching for both their positive and negative consequences for motivation. Evaluating Learning. The final category of

excellent explanation by Tom Vander Ark on why parent-managed learner profiles are becoming more important all the time for young people.  Is the corollary true for adults owning their learning in portable, digital carry-alongs for sharing with potential employers, etc.  

Good history of Mozilla's open badge project, a joint venture between the Mozilla and MacArthur foundations. The open badge system is now called Badgr and is launched by a new entity for this purpose, Concentric Sky in partnership with edX. It is still open source and badge criteria still displays with the badge when awarded and displayed on a web site, profile, etc.

Mozilla wiki page on their open digital badge system. Good graphic of how it works.

article in Academic Matters, the Journal of Higher Education, by Stephen Carson and Jan Philipp Schmidt, May 2012 issue. Excerpt: "Expertise will be earned and maintained through ongoing lifelong education, not conferred once and good for life. Open learning systems offer the possibility for the kind of continuous lifelong learning that will be necessary as the pace of technological and scientific knowledge development increases. Like athletes, learners will not just learn once, but will maintain a level of performance ability in their chosen field through ongoing study and participation in learning communities."

Facilitating life long learning should be the goal of every teacher. I think that sometimes it is so cumbersome - passing tests, etc., that the fun part of learning is lost.

Authors did an opening exercise at a conference in 2010 to force choices by educators on organizationally controlled vs. individually controlled PLEs. It clear that the shift is toward individualized learning supported/guided by educators side by side not in front of the learner. Excerpt "To help them in this endeavour, institutions have an important role as guides (not leaders) that have to trespass their own walls and enter the environments (in plural) where learning actually takes place, which increasingly is outside of the framework of formality. In fact, this seems to be answering at the WHAT question: what is learning in the digital era? The rest of pairs (Openness and the Barriers) seem to be pointing at the HOW question: how should learning be carried on in the digital era?. The answer seems to be open and flexible institutions, new educational systems and methodologies and a dire organizational change."

Blog by Matthew forti on Measuring Leadership Development, November 28, 2011 Neighborhood Builders by Bank of America builds high performing community-based nonprofits and gives them multiple three-day sessions of leadership training for the ED and emerging leader. Excerpts: "1. Develop a detailed theory of change. It isn't worth spending a dime on measurement until you've carefully defined which leaders you intend to target, what specific training and other programming they need, what they will gain, how those gains will be applied, and what should ultimately result." 2. Measure with mixed methods. 3. Continuously measure to improve impact. 4.Build rigor over time. Leadership programs don't need to build a full-scale measurement system right from the start. The best programs are intentional about whether and how to improve the rigor of their measurement over time, based partly on what they want to do with the results.