Most Discussed Posts on eCube

While migrating to the new platform, I had a chance to look back at all the posts on eCube. Here are some posts that generated really good discussion. Hope you find these posts and comments in them useful. Join in on the discussion by posting your comments.

• Anamika Biswas questions if sometimes the internal team quality standards miss the point of content and client requirements in Who is the Boss – QC or Client?
  
  
• Sonali Malik shares the merits of understanding the real audience of your learning content instead of just creating content for your “client” in Who is your Customer? – The Client or the End User?
  
  
• In the first eCube Ponder question, I asked Do We Need Instructional Designers for Technology Content Projects? that resulted in some very interesting discussion.
  
  
• In response to a Learning Circuits Big Question, Sonali Malik shares what she would like to do better as a learning professional. Others join in adding what they would like to do better.
  
  
• In the May 2008 eCube Ponder, we discussed whether IDs should have skills in areas other than writing and design. The discussion was carried forward by Sonali Malik in a separate post that attracted yet more discussion.
  
  
• Anamika Biswas shares her insight about design in Human Centered Design vs Activity Centered Design?
  
  
• Ranit Massey explores the possibility of a single-sentence definition that applies to all types of designs that we have seen, created, or envisioned in Definition of Design. It resulted in some interesting discussion including questioning the need to define ‘Design’.
  
  
• Taruna Goel explores what is simplicity questions whether simple designs are a myth or a reality.
  
  
• In Can eLearning Help Change Behaviour I explore whether self-paced asynchronous elearning can be a good tool for attempting to change behaviour? Taruna Goel helps carry forward the discussion in a separate post of her.
  
  
• Taruna Goel explores the concept of judging quality from the perspectives of different stakeholders in What is Good Quality eLearning.
  
  
• Sandipan Ray poses two questions about simplicity and plagiarism. If you want to view a good discussion on plagiarism, this is not a post to miss.
  
  
• Taruna Goel uses this blog as part of her training program to discuss Gagne’s Events of Instruction. A great example to getting the learners to think and share their thoughts.
  
  
• Rupa Rajagopalan asks a pertinent question Do Instructional Design Training Programs in India Need a Revamp?
  
  
• Rupa Rajagopalan shares 9 Quick Tips to Create Software Product Tutorials.
  
  
• Rupa Rajagopalan encourages instructional designers to play games to improve their visualization skills, creativity and ways to engage with the audience.
  
  
• Taruna Goel and Sonali Malik share their views on what is good writing.
  
  
• Cynthia Rankin shares 7 tips to write in plain English.
  
  
• In Solve a Business Problem or Create a WBT? I encourage instructional designers to focus on better understanding the business problems that client might be facing and then design a solution for it.
  
  
• In a more recent posts (relatively recent that is), I ask what is one hour of elearning to try to demystify the most common metric in the industry.

Rebooting eCube

A few months back, my hosting service provided informed me that they are shutting down the hosting business. After contemplating options, I have moved eCube to Blogger platform, primarily because it is free even for using a custom domain. URL and RSS feed is the same so you should not have to change anything.

eCube started about two years ago as an experiment of constructivism learning, an attempt to create a collaborative learning environment to share and learn with each other. Over last two years, 15 authors shared their thoughts on more than 100 posts. eCube was also used as part of a training program with participants discussing their thoughts on Gagne’s Events of Instruction.

It’s been a journey full of learning with some very exciting posts. I will continue to share with you things I find interesting and useful about elearning and workplace learning.

Encourage | Engage | Explore

For those interested in the technical gory details, it wasn’t easy to migrate from self-hosted Wordpress to Blogger. There aren’t really any easy tools available for conversion. I tried Wordpress to Blogger Google Code project. This works well but is limited to files less than 1MB only. There’s a downloadable version of this tool also available but that looked too complicated for me to handle. Then I found Blog2Blog tool that I finally used. Unfortunately this tool doesn’t convert comments and tags (labels), so these have been manually updated. The other challenge was that all posts appear under my name. I haven’t yet found a way to assign individual posts to specific authors so I have added a note for who the author of the post is for posts not written by me. Moving post pictures was also done manually. While the pictures were appearing on Blogger, they were referenced to the old Wordpress location, which is not available anymore. So the pictures had to be imported to blogger and references changed manually.

eCube shutting down

The hosting provider of eCube has informed me that they are going out of business and will shut down operations by 31 Dec 2009. I need to move this blog to a new hosting provider if I want to continue with this blog. Not sure if I will. eCube was meant to be a team blog and it has served its purpose. eCube will shut down after December this year... unless someone volunteers to run this blog.

PS: I am allowed to change my mind. December is still far away.

Inviting Writers for eCube

Starting July, you have the chance to win a surprise gift from eCube each month for next three months. All you have to do is write a post on eCube on anything related to training, learning and education. I'll be giving away one free gift each month for posts on eCube*.

Some suggested areas on which you are write a post:

• Designing better instruction


• How to write for different audiences


• Writing scenarios, dialogs


• Tips on different type of scenarios for various types of content


• Project management in instructional design projects


• Extracting content from SMEs, interviewing SMEs, best practices of involving SMEs in a project


• Tips on different types of interactivities that can be included in our courses


• How to learn content


• Collaboration tips for instructional design projects


• Selling your design idea to stakeholders


• Tools for rapid elearning, rapid protoyping


• LMSs and issues of deploying elearning content


• Creativity, thinking out of the box


• Leadership, people mentoring, training and developing instructional design teams


• Instructional design theories and practices


• Industry trends in elearning and content


• Any news about companies that might be of interest to the eCube community


• Anything related to training, learning and education

Send me an email at manishm at ecube . co . in to register on this site. I will approve your first post before it is published live.

* Fine print:

- There must be at least 4 posts in the month for anyone to be eligible for the gift, even if all four posts are written by one person.

- Your gift will be shipped free within India only.

eCube LinkedIn Group now 500+

The eCube LinkedIn Group membership quietly crossed 500 a few days ago. The group is 518 members strong as I write this. This is an open group of learning, training and education professionals. Do join in the conversation ongoing there.

Flashback of First Year of eCube

The first post on eCube was written on 10 Feb 2007 and we approach completing the first year of eCube. And end of a calendar year is always a good time to reflect on the year gone by. So here's a flashback of activity on eCube in 2008, and well, close to its first year of inception.

Started off as an experiment to use Web 2.0 tools for collaborative learning by reflecting on our experiences, eCube has in the last 11 months or so has had 86 posts by 20 authors attracting 175 comments. This blog has managed to clock more than 11,000 views in about 6,000 visits.

Top 5 viewed posts/pages on eCube have been:

1. Directory of elearning companies in India - eCube

2. The second Working/Learning blog carnival - Manish Mohan

3. Gagne's Events of Instruction - Some Thoughts and Views - Taruna Goel

4. Design- Human Centered Design vs Activity Centered Design? - Anamika Biswas

5. Instructional Design: Two Questions - Sandipan Ray

I also want to mention Login Vs. Log In. While this is at close 6^th place, Login vs. Log In appeared in many search results. There are a lot of people searching for the correct usage of Login, Log In, Logon and Log On. This post is at close 6^th place.

Authors who contributed with most posts on eCube are:

1. Manish Mohan

2. Taruna Goel

3. Anamika Biswas

4. Sonali Malik

5. Anjalie Choudhary, Rupa Rajagopalan and Viplav Baxi

Some posts also attracted fair amount of conversation in the form of comments. Top 5 posts with most comments were:

1. Gagne's Events of Instruction - Some Thoughts and Views - Taruna Goel

2. Instructional Design: Two questions - Sandipan

3. Do We Need Instructional Designers for Technology Content Projects? - Manish Mohan

4. Do Instructional Design Training Programs in India Need a Revamp? - Rupa Rajagopalan

5. Design- Human Centered Design vs Activity Centered Design? - Anamika Biswas

6. What would you like to do better as a Learning Professional? - Sonali Malik



Google Analytics provides the following statistics:







The eCube community also thrived on Facebook (153 members) and LinkedIn (181 members at last count and growing).

Announcing eCube Community Site

Announcing the launch of eCube Community Social Networking site. Connect with other like minded professionals in the field of learning, education and training. Create your own social networking friend circle, write your blog, form groups to discuss specific topics, and share bookmarks, photos and files.

Register now and join the community. Set up your profile to share your interest and skills.

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Century on eCube Facebook Group

eCube Facebook group membership is now 102 strong. This networked community has members from India, USA, UK, Canada, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, and Czech Republic. The community collectively provides experience in instructional design, training, competency development, media, technology, project management, sales, HR, and business management. There are clients, vendors and consultants in the community. I encourage you to tap into this very rich and experienced community.

New Look at eCube

eCube now has a new look and feel. I wanted something bright and refreshing. I used the WP-Polaroid for Blogger template that I downloaded from eblog templates. It took more time than I expected but in the process I created a blog template upgrade checklist. I realized that there is too much code (analytics, tracking, label customization etc.) that is embedded that needs to be ported to the new template code. And the widgets got all messed up in the new template so I had to create many widgets all over again. Getting the author name was a challenge and I still don’t have the post date (only post time is visible).

There is still some fine tuning to be done over the next few days. I still don’t know how to automatically archive the Blogger poll widgets (so bear with them on the side bars). And the Outbrain rating stars still don’t appear on the posts. And post contributors will need to log on to their Blogger Dashboard to be able to create a new post on the blog till I figure out how to get back the top Blogger navigation bar.

Like it, hate it, have suggestions for improvement? Do post your comments on the new interface. There is also a new poll about the interface. Do drop by and provide your feedback.

Creating a Collaborative Learning Environment

Having bloged on my own for a while, I am now starting an experiment of using the Web 2.0 tools to create a Collaborative Learning Environment. I will admit, this is not new and I have found many examples of such environments, many of which I will be talking about in posts to follow. I am hoping that a collaborative learning environment will combine the best of many personal learning environments in the team.

Our experiment of constructivism learning started with a small group of 7 instructional designers and 1 project manager in the physical world, i.e. a meeting room in our office. The intent of taking this online is to include many more in our learning experience. The idea is to Engage people by Encouraging them to Explore new Environments and Experiment with the them. We settled on 3 Es to finalize on this eCube community.

As we experiment with our logo, here are the initial ideas. Let's see how the logo finally turns out.

I expect the 1% rule will probably be applicable in this blog too but I am hoping that since the audience for this one is more targetted and defined, perhaps we will have more than 1% contributors and 10% commenters.