Out and About: Community of the Blogosphere

One of the great things about being involved in the training/education blogosphere is the great interactions you get to have with people that you’ve never meet or that you only see once or twice a year or that you’ve only been introduced to once but now stay in touch due to blogging.

Of course the above statement is rather obvious…but a number of recent postings around the blogosphere has brought this to the forefront of my thinking.

First, Mike Qaissaunee, an Associate Professor of Engineering and Technology at Brookdale Community College who blogs at Frequently Asked Q who I get to see in person only twice a year has an interesting blog entry titled Don’t Know Much About History where he talks about a timeline program called Xtimeline. He explains how it works and even timelined (is that a word) my blog. It would be great to see more of Mike, he always has the latest gadgets and is constantly finding cools stuff on the web. I met him through my involvement on a National Science Foundation grant and am glad we can keep in touch through blogging…much better than email since it is like he is sharing ideas with me (and all his other readers) on a regular basis. It’s good to keep in touch via blogs. Thanks Mike for timelining my site (although, I’m still not convinced of its historical significance)

Next, Cole Camplese is an alumni of Bloomsburg University’s Instructional Technology program but I never had the good fortune to have him in class since he graduated before I began teaching in the program. Cole blogs at Cole Camplese: Learning and Innovation. He is only about 1 1/2 hours away at Penn State and we have corresponded a number of times but we never seem to get together face-to-face. He has a posting titled Second Life in Bloomsburg, PA where he discusses the Second Life class done at Bloomsburg this summer and gets some great reactions from some of his readers. Hopefully Cole and I can get together sometime this fall, he is doing great stuff. Cole, thanks for the posting and let’s get together in person!

I’ve never met Cammy Bean in person or even have any connection to her at all but through the blogosphere. Recently Cammy and I have been having some discussions about Second Life and…in some cases, we didn’t always agree on the conclusion (friendly discussions mind you) so we arranged a tour of the MSIT Second Life island and we had a great time! It was a lot of virtual fun. You can read about her experience in Plodding Along in Second Life. I managed to grab a snap shot shown below.The experience reminded me of how much I take for granted within Second Life…a good experience for me and I hope for her as well. Thanks, Cammy, I had a great time, we’ll have to do it again sometime.

Phil Charron works at Performance Development Group, a great design and development company, in the area of simulations. I’ve worked with a bunch of people at PDG and always enjoy it. We’ll I sent a bunch of them copies of Gadgets, Games and Gizmos for Learning and Phil is blogging about it on Learning Simulations. You can read what he has to say at Games, Gadgets and Gizmos for Learning and GGG4L. Phil, thanks for sharing your thoughts about the book.

There are countless other examples but I just want to end with a shout out to Christy Tucker at Experiencing E-Learning. She was kind enough a few months ago to engage me in a discussion about my standard presentation for Gadgets, Games and Gizmos for Learning. She provided some straight forward advice and ideas about how to improve the presentation, I’ve incorporated her suggestions into the presentation and it is now much stronger because of it. Thanks.

So, the blogosphere is a wonderful community in which ideas, thoughts, innovation and, most importantly, friendship can be shared. Take full advantage of this unique opportunity and, if you are blogging, take a moment to thank some of your fellow bloggers. Together we make a great community…thanks.

(ok, tomorrow’s post will be a little less sappy, I promise)

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