A New Future

So, last month I posted my own reaction to the Future of eLearning post at eLearn Magazine. In it, I made a prediction that I would be on a different journey from others in the eLearning world:

My thought is that we will always have some form of traditional eLearning. Corporations and other more conservative entities will take a long time to let go of the traditional way of doing eLearning.

But there will be places where change is welcomed; where the traditional way just won't work anymore. I guess that's where I'll be headed when the time comes, whenever and wherever that may be.

Well, it looks like that time may be coming sooner rather than later. The contract I was working on has not been renewed, no great surprise in this economy, but disappointing none-the-less. Especially since we did support business goals and did provide a service that would have the potential to draw in more customers, meaning we did have the potential to make an impact on the bottom line. The groups we worked with knew that, but the decision-makers didn't get that far. They just saw "contract training group" and that was that. So be it. It is the way of the consultant to be the first to go.

Now it's time to look more closely at the options, become even more involved in where I want to go and see where I wind up. It's still pretty scary, like jumping off a bridge scary, but sometimes you have to take big risks to get where you need to go. So, with some trepidation, but also some anticipation, I look forward to what I'll find in the next few weeks, because those of us that look to the future already know...

The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet.
- William Gibson

Search - what you probably never knew about Searching, but should

I was reading Tony Karrer's blog the other day. He had written a post on using Search and ways to improve your search techniques. In this post he shared some of his tips on how to use search, especially those times that you need information and need more than what Google can provide. It was part of his Tool Set series, which includes several other great posts, but I found this post to be the most helpful to me out of all of them.

In it he discusses what you can find with Google, and why you might need to use other search engines based on what you're looking for. I won't spoil it for you as he does a much better job of writing about it than I could on rehashing what he said. However, what I will say is that if you only use one search engine (probably Google), that's fine for most searches, but you should get more skilled at using Google and consider using other search engines as well. For a great listing of alternative search engines, check out the Digital Research Tools Wiki, specifically, the Data Visualization and Visual Search Tools pages. There are a lot of other resources listed here as well, so worth checking out.

I have some learning to do now, because I, like most people, am generally a pretty lazy internet search user and could use more practice on how to be more efficient and effective when I do a search.